Movements in European History

by D.H. Lawrence, Philip Crumpton (Editor)

Movements in European History was written by D. H. Lawrence during 1918 and 1919 in response to Oxford University Press's invitation to prepare a textbook for schools. It is a vivid sketch of European history from ancient Rome to the early twentieth century, remaining significant in the canon of Lawrence's work as the only school textbook he ever wrote. Crumpton's introduction describes the genesis, publication and reception of the book, gives an account of the little-known Irish edition of 1926 which suffered much censorship, and identifies and analyses Lawrence's methods of using the source-books on which his writing was based. This edition uses the surviving manuscript to present a text as close to that which Lawrence wrote and corrected in proof as is now possible.

400 pages, Paperback

First published February 24, 1972

About the author

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism, and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct.

Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.H._Law...

Reviews

[Malcolm Hebron · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good Oxfam bookshop find. This was DHL's only textbook, and gives a narrative account of Western Europe from the Fall of Rome to the end of the nineteenth century. It was published in 1921, which puts in the company of Hendrik Willem van Loon, The Story of Mankind (1921) and H G Wells, A Short History of Mankind (1922). All these books are period pieces now, of course, but they all have a strong feel for character and narrative, qualities which never stale. When Lawrence's imagination is seized, the results are stunning. His description of 'The Germans' (meaning Visigoths etc.) and their landscape, for example: 'Across these spaces flew the wild swans, and the fierce, wild bull stood up to his knees in the swamp. Then the forest closed round again, the never-ending dark fir trees, where the tusked wild boar ran rooting and bristling in the semi-darkness under the shadows, ready to fight for his life with the grey, shadowy wolves which would sometimes encircle him.' Episodes are depicted with the kind of concrete detail that lodges them in the memory: 'On the great wall from the Forth to the Clyde the Roman sentries took their last look at the misty Highland hills to the north, then descended the towers to mount no more'. Throughout, relish for story-telling carries the reader fowards. The chapter on the unification of Italy, for example, makes that very involved subject read like an adventure story. It is worth getting the book for the chapter on the crusades alone, which is genuinely thrilling.

Movements ... is selective, as it must be, in the historical subjects it deals with, but every chapter comes across with great brio. DHL is partisan, too, clearly far more sympathetic to Protestants than Catholics, and his passionate sympathy for men of action leads to wonderful writing on Charlemagne and Garibaldi, but little space for, say, monasticism. Towards the end he pursues some superman-style theory which is rather chilling in the light of later history: 'But the will of the people must concentrate in one figure, who is also supreme over the will of the people'. A curiosity, then, but well worth reading for its novelistic power of bringing distant scenes to life. It's easy enough then to get up to speed on the current historical state of play with books byNorman Davies, J M Roberts et al.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book on how the people's of Europe continually moved around and the origins of the tribes which formed the countries and history of Europe.