Susan Reid
Susan Reid is the Editor of the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies and author of D. H. Lawrence, Music and Modernism (Palgrave, 2019). Her co-edited works include Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2011) and the forthcoming Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts (2020). An independent scholar based in the UK, she completed her Phd titled 'Masculinities in the Novels of D. H. Lawrence' at the University of Northampton in 2008.
less
Uploads
Papers
Musicologist Carl Dahlhaus defines modernism in music as the progressive music of the period 1890-1910, with the music of Mahler, Strauss and Debussy marking a historic transformation. It can therefore be argued that modernism in music preceded and even shaped literary modernism. Indeed, by 1910, Sergei Diaghilev was shocking audiences with performances by the Ballets Russes which combined avant-garde music, choreography and design, in a way that seems quintessentially modernist according to Daniel Albright’s conception that “the arts seem endlessly interpermeable, a set of fluid systems of construing and reinterpreting, in which the quest for meaning engages all our senses at once”. To what extent, then, did Lawrence belong and contribute to this stream of modernism? Did he respond to developments in music, in the way that critics suggest that he responded to art, literature and philosophy? And what might we learn about his creative development by putting music at its centre?
http://dorothyrichardson.org/PJDRS/Issue7/Contents_assets/Reid15.html
Books
Reviews
“If music in Lawrence has previously seemed a marginal theme, Susan Reid shows it to be a major question both within the oeuvre and in relation to broader modernist culture. How has this topic been missed? Her over-arching yet close-grained argument will surely be the classic point of reference.” (Michael Bell, Professor Emeritus, University of Warwick, UK)
“This pathbreaking study will provide an invaluable research resource for music in D. H. Lawrence’s works and inter-arts Modernism for years to come. Reid’s monumental undertaking encompasses Lawrence’s profound engagements with acoustical, contemporary, classical, folk, and experimental musical forms in each phase of this virtuosic career, in poetry and the novel, culminating in exposition of Lawrence’s own compositions in music for his epic, last play, David.” (Holly A. Laird, Frances W. O’Hornett Chair of Literature, University of Tulsa, USA)
“D.H. Lawrence, Music and Modernism returns its subject to the center of a series of debates currently energizing Twentieth Century Studies. Brilliantly researched and beautifully written, Dr. Reid’s study consolidates Lawrence’s reputation as a front-rank literary modernist – one who (alongside Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Proust, Mann and many other writers) was drawn to music as a means to explore a series of aesthetic, personal and political issues.” (Gerry Smyth, Professor of Irish Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University, UK)
In the crowded field of Lawrence studies, it is rare to encounter new critical perspectives as widely informed and as strikingly original as this impressive work of interdisciplinary scholarship by Susan Reid. Carefully contextualised, lucidly argued and thought-provoking throughout, Reid’s meticulous tracing of the intricate web of ligatures that link Lawrence, music and modernism uncovers a whole new dimension to Lawrence’s work and provides valuable soundings for future research of a related nature. (Paul Poplawski, Lawrence scholar and bibliographer, formerly of the University of Leicester, UK)
Book Reviews
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pp. cxiii + 745. £85.00 (hardcover). ISBN 978 0 5218 7895 1
In September 1919, Lawrence drafted a Foreword to his then unpublished Women in Love (1920), explaining that “it is a novel which took its final shape in the midst of the period of war, though it does not concern the war itself. I should wish the time to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters” (WL 485). A month later, in October 1919, Virginia Woolf published her second novel, Night and Day, also written during the War and making no mention of it. ...
Musicologist Carl Dahlhaus defines modernism in music as the progressive music of the period 1890-1910, with the music of Mahler, Strauss and Debussy marking a historic transformation. It can therefore be argued that modernism in music preceded and even shaped literary modernism. Indeed, by 1910, Sergei Diaghilev was shocking audiences with performances by the Ballets Russes which combined avant-garde music, choreography and design, in a way that seems quintessentially modernist according to Daniel Albright’s conception that “the arts seem endlessly interpermeable, a set of fluid systems of construing and reinterpreting, in which the quest for meaning engages all our senses at once”. To what extent, then, did Lawrence belong and contribute to this stream of modernism? Did he respond to developments in music, in the way that critics suggest that he responded to art, literature and philosophy? And what might we learn about his creative development by putting music at its centre?
http://dorothyrichardson.org/PJDRS/Issue7/Contents_assets/Reid15.html
Reviews
“If music in Lawrence has previously seemed a marginal theme, Susan Reid shows it to be a major question both within the oeuvre and in relation to broader modernist culture. How has this topic been missed? Her over-arching yet close-grained argument will surely be the classic point of reference.” (Michael Bell, Professor Emeritus, University of Warwick, UK)
“This pathbreaking study will provide an invaluable research resource for music in D. H. Lawrence’s works and inter-arts Modernism for years to come. Reid’s monumental undertaking encompasses Lawrence’s profound engagements with acoustical, contemporary, classical, folk, and experimental musical forms in each phase of this virtuosic career, in poetry and the novel, culminating in exposition of Lawrence’s own compositions in music for his epic, last play, David.” (Holly A. Laird, Frances W. O’Hornett Chair of Literature, University of Tulsa, USA)
“D.H. Lawrence, Music and Modernism returns its subject to the center of a series of debates currently energizing Twentieth Century Studies. Brilliantly researched and beautifully written, Dr. Reid’s study consolidates Lawrence’s reputation as a front-rank literary modernist – one who (alongside Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Proust, Mann and many other writers) was drawn to music as a means to explore a series of aesthetic, personal and political issues.” (Gerry Smyth, Professor of Irish Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University, UK)
In the crowded field of Lawrence studies, it is rare to encounter new critical perspectives as widely informed and as strikingly original as this impressive work of interdisciplinary scholarship by Susan Reid. Carefully contextualised, lucidly argued and thought-provoking throughout, Reid’s meticulous tracing of the intricate web of ligatures that link Lawrence, music and modernism uncovers a whole new dimension to Lawrence’s work and provides valuable soundings for future research of a related nature. (Paul Poplawski, Lawrence scholar and bibliographer, formerly of the University of Leicester, UK)
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pp. cxiii + 745. £85.00 (hardcover). ISBN 978 0 5218 7895 1
In September 1919, Lawrence drafted a Foreword to his then unpublished Women in Love (1920), explaining that “it is a novel which took its final shape in the midst of the period of war, though it does not concern the war itself. I should wish the time to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters” (WL 485). A month later, in October 1919, Virginia Woolf published her second novel, Night and Day, also written during the War and making no mention of it. ...