Content area
Full Text
Warren Roberts and Paul Poplawski. A Bibliography of D.H. Lawrence. Third edition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Pp. xxiv + 847. $130.
Most academics do not realize how difficult it is to create a scholarly bibliography. Simply discovering and locating all the books and assembling all the facts is no mean feat in the case of a writer like Lawrence, who was so prolific and who has enjoyed such staying power. Indeed, anyone who attempts merely to measure a book precisely and describe all its contents accurately will discover how challenging (and sometimes numbing) bibliography can be. But beyond gathering and ordering the myriad details, the bibliographer must select those that are appropriate to the needs of his or her audience. The bibliographer must make sense of the disparate, often ambiguous facts regarding an author's books as physical objects and the publishing history of these books. In the bargain a successful bibliography doubles as something like a clandestine biography of the chosen author.
In all three of its editions, A Bibliography of D.H. Lawrence has been a centerpiece of Lawrence studies. Lawrence's bibliographer, the late Warren Roberts, served many years as the director of the Humanities Research Center at Texas, where he assembled one of the world's pre-eminent collections of Lawrence books and manuscripts. Roberts was also one of the general editors of the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence. The first (1963) and second (1982) editions of the bibliography are long since out of print. In the third edition Paul Poplawski becomes Roberts's exemplary successor - as readers of Poplawski's meticulous D.H. Lawrence: A Reference Companion (1996) would expect. Following Roberts's death early in 1998, Poplawski has completed (and expanded) the bibliography with admirable thoroughness, discrimination, and creativity.
The second edition of the Bibliography has 626 pages; the third edition has grown to 847. Throughout the third edition the scholarly narratives have been reorganized and are fuller and more coherent. For example, Sons and Lovers occupies three pages in the...