"This is an admirable text—fascinating, provocative and critically incisive all the way through. Pinkney writes with wit, clarity and brio."—Steven Connor

"This is a lucid, witty, scholarly, accessible and original rereading. Theory, here, has become practice; so that one can recognize the necessity of the former in the day-to-day business of reading, teaching and learning. I really enjoyed the sequence of deconstructive turns, the controlled intertextuality, the reengagement of close reading with cultural history, the style of the enterprise."—Peter Widdowson

"Learned, witty, exciting to read in its penetrating subversions of critical orthodoxy, written throughout with an infectious esprit."—Graham Holderness

This major new theoretical study concentrates on Lawrence as a modernist writer. It traces his difficult break into, and then beyond, realism in the early novels, reveals for the first time Lawrence's powerful discovery of a radically anti-classicist "Gothic" or "Northern" modernism in this middle period, and concludes with an exploration of his sustained diagnosis of, and battle with, the classicist modernism of James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and others in his later work.