The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (Penguin Modern Classics)

by D H Lawrence (Author), Brian Finney (Editor), Brian Finney (Introduction), Brian Finney (Editor), D H Lawrence (Author), Brian Finney (Introduction), John Worthen (Editor), D H Lawrence (Author), D H Lawrence (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1995

  $4.03

  His first published collection, these twelve stories were written between 1907 and 1914, during a crucial period of development for Lawrence from which he emerged a leading figure of the modernist movement. Reaching new levels of feeling and experience, these stories range from the tale of a Prussian officer who drives his orderly towards a bloody reckoning, to the strangely exotic elements of 'A Fragment of Stained Glass', and the divisions within society and conflicts of the heart that form the central themes of 'Daughters of a Vicar'. Interweaving individual lives, their happiness, failures and defeats, with the prfound forces of nature, Lawrence has created stories of remarkable power and sensitivity. This Penguin edition reproduces the newly established Cambridge text, which is based on Lawrence's manuscripts, typescripts and corrected proofs.

• Used

  Paperback
  1995

  $7.32

  The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914) was Lawrence's first collection of stories, and it includes some of his finest and most distinctive fiction. The collection forms a bridge between his apprenticeship in realism, which culminatied in Sons and Lovers , and the visionary language and historical sweep of The Rainbow . Lawrence's arrangement of the stories, restored for the first time in this edition, also offers his diagnosis of the development of British society and its literature between 1870 and the outbreak of the First World War. Widely praised stories like `Odour of Chrysanthemums', `Daughters of the Vicar', and `The Prussian Officer' show people moving from a communal world, in which they battle against poverty, class prejudice, and natural disaster, to a more independent existence, full of potential for both self-fulfilment and self-destruction. These short stories celebrate the vitality that is fundamental in Lawrence's vision of life, and demonstrate the diversity of interests, narrative power, and vivid sense of place and character that distinguish the works of an acknowledged master in the genre. This book is intended for students of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century British literature from sixth form upwards, but mostly 2nd/3rd-year undergraduates.