期刊名称：E-rea : Revue Électronique d’Études sur le Monde Anglophone
电子版ISSN：1638-1718
出版年度：2004
卷号：2
期号：2
页码：1
出版社：Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA)
摘要：This book is, among other things, a reminder of how large a part chance plays in the emergence of classic works of literature. The book that was eventually published as Studies in Classic American Literature in 1923 was the outcome of a longer period of gestation and drafting than any book of Lawrence’s other than Women in Love—about seven years in all. For some of that time, at least, Lawrence considered it (or one of the forms that it passed through) as his most important work after The Rainbow and Women in Love. For a long time Lawrence enthusiasts have been aware that these essays existed in an earlier form, and many of them will have possessed the book published in 1962 and edited by Armin Arnold with the title The Symbolic Meaning, which gathered together what was in effect a completely new book of essays by Lawrence, so different are these essays from the final versions. (One of my few quarrels with the present edition is its ungenerous notice of Arnold’s service to Lawrence’s readers.) The final version is notoriously flippant, opinionated, disrespectful and informal. The earlier version is much more sober, considered and carefully argued. Lawrence tried to get the earlier version published by Benjamin Huebsch and Thomas Seltzer, but both men prevaricated and delayed, and by the time Seltzer finally agreed to publish, Lawrence had transformed the book. Both versions, plus other variants of individual essays, are gathered in this magisterial piece of scholarship. Studies in Classic American Literature has infuriated as many readers as it has delighted, but it is an indispensable model of one of the ways in which criticism might be written. If Huebsch or Seltzer had agreed to publish earlier, some of Lawrence’s classic formulations, such as ‘Art speech is the only truth’ and ‘Never trust the artist. Trust the tale’ would never have been written.
