lawrence
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Lawrence analyzes modern society, its mores and its malaise, more profoundly than any of his contemporaries.
Many issues with which Lawrence deals intimately concern our own society now. Both as an artist and as a thinker he confronts life in the fullness of his passion and intellect. Our response to his work now should be as alert and vital as if he had written for our own time.
The element of self-exploration makes Sons and Lovers in one respect a very traditional kind of novel. However, its confidence, intensity and strange mixture of self-mistrust and self-knowledge does mark a new stage in Lawrences writing. He dramatizes much of his early life in this novel, such as his family background, his education, but he always keeps before himself the need to create a work of the imagination. Sons and Lovers is a great work of self-analysis by a young writer looking back on the recent years of growing up, but it is always first and foremost a novel, not an autobiography.
Lawrence insists on the total difference of man and woman and he denies the impulse to blend two personalities into one, losing their identity. He appeals for total separateness between people and true individuality...