Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday Book

More about D.H. Lawrence than Classic American Literature. And more of an examination of his own personal spiritual precepts than the inner-workings of novels and stories by Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, etc. He dissects Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" not for its literary values, but for the ethical principles it embodies which can be practically applied to life.

That said, Lawrence was among the first major critics to take these works seriously and recognize their radical shift away from European literature. He perceptively identifies one of the key aspects of this early American fiction -- the dark story carefully hidden beneath the work's relatively conventional surface. And he celebrates their true extremity.

Too bad he didn't also tackle Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" and somehow missed Emily Dickinson, whose work is both a prime exemplar of his literary theory and complicates it to no end.

3.5 stars