Etruscan Places: Travels Through Forgotten Italy

by D. H. Lawrence

Overview

The Etruscan civilisation, which flourished from the 8th until the 5th century BC in what is now Tuscany, is one of the most fascinating and mysterious in history. An uninhibited, elemental people, the Etruscans enthralled D.H. Lawrence, who craved their 'old wisdom', the secret of their vivacity and love of life. To him they represented the antithesis of everything he despised in the modern world, perhaps because their spontaneity and naturalness struck a chord with his own quest for personal and artistic freedom - so often censured or repressed. Lawrence approaches the enigmatic Etruscans as a poet, passionately and searchingly, and so the reader is swept up in his luminous descriptions of a utopian world where dancing and feasting, art and music were everything. The exhilaration of Lawrence in his Etruscan adventures stands in stark contrast to his intimations of the darkness of Mussolini's Italy - at a time when Europe was beginning its inexorable drift towards tragedy. The last of Lawrence's travel books, 'Etruscan Places' is an ephemeral and vivid account, replete with hauntingly evocative descriptions of the way of life of this once great civilisation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781838600228
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	07/16/2019
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.26(w) x 7.79(h) x 0.55(d)

About the Author

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), novelist, poet, playwright, painter, critic, is an icon of 20th century literature. He began writing at an early age, publishing his first novel, The White Peacock, when he was twenty-five, Sons and Lovers three years later and The Rainbow and Women in Love in his thirties. His hatred of militarism, openly expressed during the First World War, sparked a wave of vilification that forced him to leave England and embark on what he called his 'Savage Pilgrimage'. He spent the remainder of his life travelling - to America, Italy, Austria, Mexico, the South of France and Sri Lanka - and it was during this time that he wrote such classics as Sea and Sardinia, The Plumed Serpent and Lady Chatterley's Lover. With the exception of E.M. Forster, who called him 'the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation' and friends such as Aldous Huxley, Lawrence's obituarists were dismissive and hostile. It was not until The Lady Chatterley Trial thirty years after his death and the subsequent publication of the book that Lawrence was finally recognised as one of the great writers and thinkers of his age.

Date of Birth:

September 11, 1885

Date of Death:

March 2, 1930

Place of Birth:

Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England

Place of Death:

Vence, France

Education:

Nottingham University College, teacher training certificate, 1908

Editorial Reviews

"He wrote something like three dozen books, of which even the worst page dances with life that could be mistaken for no other man’s, while the best are admitted, even by those who hate him, to be unsurpassed" - Time and Tide

"He is an extraordinarily acute noticer of the world, human and natural. And it is not just the natural world that beckons Lawrence to flood it with beautiful language . . . he can be as precise and compact an observer of human interaction as Flaubert or Forster." - The Guardian

From the Publisher