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One Vast Hermeneutic Sentence: The Total Lawrentian Text

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Gerald Doherty
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Abstract

While Lawrence's total novelistic production is generally conceived of as a loose aggregation of highly individual texts, each departing significantly from the norms that shape the traditional novel, the complete oeuvre conforms to the rules the single works violate: it approximates the discursive form Roland Barthes proposes for the classic realist plot. In the light of three powerful models—based on the sentence, the classic realist narrative, and a topological paradigm that synthesizes the two—Lawrence's changing structures from the early to the late fiction emerge as one well-organized traditional text that displays the characteristic articulations of narrative beginnings, middles, and endings, especially in the unfolding of the erotic visions and wisdoms that the individual novels explore.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 106 , Issue 5 , October 1991 , pp. 1134 - 1145
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1991

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