ABSTRACT
The final volume of The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, Modern British Literature, includes a long extract-nine pages, almost the whole-from Lawrence’s essay ‘Pornography and obscenity’. This minor fact may seem quite unremarkable. It could be cited as one of many pieces of evidence for the contemporary stature of Lawrence, the kind of writer whose auxiliary publications are considered canonical too; and the essay’s subject-matter might be seen as an indirect allusion to the particularly violent curbs his works faced and then overcame before he attained his deserved place (among others, The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley’s Lover were subject to banning following their publication). The editors, John Hollander and Frank Kermode, draw attention to this latter aspect in their introduction to the piece, beginning with the statement that ‘Lawrence had first-hand experience of those he called “the censormorons”’, and then providing a brief history of the fortunes of Lady Chatterley.1 In light of the triumphant ending, Lawrence’s struggle seems all the more heroic, retrospectively a sign of popular philistinism prior to the due assignment of his deserved literary status.
