The Rhetoric of the Unselfconscious in D.H. Lawrence

Book excerpt: "In this study of the Lady Chatterley novels, Masami Nakabayashi pays particular attention to D.H. Lawrence's language for the feelings and for the life of the unselfconscious, sexual body. The novels constantly find ways of verbalising the characters' internalised experiences as they occur in states of unselfconsciousness. Lawrence's language for sensual feelings and emotions has always been regarded as simply 'sexual' and no previous critics have explored or made sense of the complexities of his peculiar, but extremely sophisticated, writing practice in the Lady Chatterley novels. Lawrence was a habitual reviser of his work, and, despite the availability of reliable texts in the Cambridge edition, few critics have traced the nature and significance of his changes from one draft to the next. By examining and analysing the novels' particular linguistic revisions, Masami Nakabayashi reveals the textual impulse behind Lawrence's original conception and its subsequent change and development"--Back cover.