- Paperback: 410 pages
- Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks; New edition edition (6 Jan 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0192836390
- ISBN-13: 978-0192836397
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,383,662 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Authors
Discover books, learn about writers, and more.
Product Description
Product Description
`Like a tree that is falling, going soft and pale and rotten, clammy with small fungi, he stood leaning against the gate, while the dim afternoon drifted with a flow of thick sweet sunshine past him, not touching him.' Lawrence's first novel is a compelling exploration of the estrangements of modern life. Focusing on three relationships - one destructively stillborn, one disastrously unfulfilling and one passionately unspoken - Lawrence exploits the language and conventions of the rural tradition to foreground man's alienation from the natural world. His evocation of the vanishing countryside of the English midlands, as soon through the eyes of the effete Cyril Beardsall, is both vivid and arresting, and as the novel draws towards its tragic conclusion Lawrence handles his themes with an increasingly visionary power. The White Peacock is both a fascinating precursor of the more famous novels to come and a moving and challenging book in its own right. In his introduction to this edition David Bradshaw reassesses this often underrated novel, and shows how Lawrence was already breaking the mould of English fiction.
Book Description
The Cambridge edition of Lawrence's first novel The White Peacock uses the final manuscript to faithfully recover Lawrence's words and punctuation from the layers of publishers' house-styling and their errors. Andrew Robertson's introduction sets out the history of Lawrence's writing and revision, and the novel's generally favourable reception.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A lovely book full of youthfulness and vivid, sensuous, brilliant descriptions of the English countryside. This is Lawrence's first novel, written when he was in his early twenties and, he claims, full of his own youth. It fills me with a desire to read of all of his work once again and perhaps thereby to come to a much fuller understanding of Lawrence than I have had before. Perhaps I can even contribute something to our common understanding of his work, his character, his thinking, and his dense symbolism. This is not a novel of plot but of characterization, with each chapter a self-contained short story but adding more information to what has gone before. Each chapters is like a little film taken at a specific time in the ten-year sweep of the novel. It's told in the first person by a very acute, quiet and modest narrator, whose name is Cyril but whose friends sometimes refer to as Sybil - and indeed there are numerous suggestions that the author was going through a period of same-sex attraction in the period before Frieda. The narrator goes everywhere and quietly witnesses everything about a small group of people growing up in the rural area of Nottingham, the Eastwood of Lawrence's birth. In form, this is very much like Women in Love and the other novels of that trilogy, but it gives one a stronger appreciation of Lawrence in some way. It is a coming of age novel, but one in which the narrator participates very modestly, merely as a spectator, and one who sprinkles a special atmosphere on everything that happens. The only fault in this novel is a slight but persistent sense of over-reaching on the part of the author. It leaves me feeling however that Lawrence, as great as he is deemed, is still underrated.
Format:Paperback
I thoroughly enjoyed The White Peacock. I am probably biased as I am DH Lawrence's cousin. My mother is a Beardsall. I found the book to be very descriptive and it was easy to visualise the settings and the characters. It is much softer than his later work and a great introduction to his writing. I highly recommend it, especially for first time readers of this author.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This was Lawrence's first published novel in the UK, and represents the writer's early experiment in the quest for an established style.
Far too much descriptive detail, and too little narrative, to be considered an enjoyable read. It is however interesting to note the early appearance of themes that were to dominate later Lawrence works. In particular, the nature-civilisation dichotomy, which became a Lawrence trademark, is apparent here in the relationship between the cultured, educated narrator and his best friend, the raw-boned but affable farmer, George.
Readers wishing to introduce themselves to Lawrence would be better advised to start with the book published two years later, and that marked the beginning of his literary reputation: "Sons and Lovers"
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Was this review helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
