Vol. 19, No. 17

Jan. 27, 2000

English prof recognized for
D.H. Lawrence scholarship

Dennis Jackson, English, has been a D. H. Lawrence admirer and scholar for most of his academic career, beginning with his doctoral dissertation comparing three versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Since then, he has written and edited several books and numerous articles about the famed and controversial British writer, who died in 1930. From 1984-94, he also edited the D.H. Lawrence Review, an academic journal published at UD three times a year with an international readership in 35 different countries, including Japan, China and India as well as the Americas and Europe. He passed on the editorship to his former graduate student William Harrison, AS ’88, who later received his master’s and doctorate from Delaware and now teaches at the State University of New York in Geneseo. Last month, Jackson was recognized by the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America with the Harry T. Moore Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship, at the Modern Language Association convention in Chicago. The award is presented every two years to an individual who “has made an outstanding career-long contribution to the development of Lawrence studies.” Previous recipients include scholars from Brown University, Nice University in France and the University of Birmingham in England. “I graduated from Belhaven College in Mississippi–a small Presbyterian school which did not include Lawrence’s works in its curriculum, so I did not encounter his writing until I took a course in graduate school at the University of Arkansas. When I first began reading his works, I felt an affinity with him,” Jackson said. “We both came from a working class background. He remembers his father covered with coal dust from the mines where he worked. My father worked for the railroad and my memories are of him with his clothes grimy with cinders and oil from his job. My father, like his, had a problem with alcohol,” Jackson recalled. Lawrence was a romantic who felt a strong kinship with nature. Calling him a “speleologist of the subconscious,” Jackson said Lawrence was an erotic writer who recognized and understood human sexuality and wrote about it openly. His frankness about sexuality was misconstrued as pornography, and the result was censorship and the banning of some of his books, such as The Rainbow and Lady Chatterly’s Lover, for several years. Now, he is recognized as one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, Jackson said. “Studying Lawrence is studying creativity at work. For example, when he revised a book, he would start all over again from scratch. The three versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lovers that he wrote are quite different from each other. All three versions have been published under different titles,” Jackson pointed out. The books Jackson has edited and written about Lawrence include Editing D.H. Lawrence: New Versions of a Modern Author with Charles L. Ross; D.H. Lawrence’s Literary Inheritors with Keith Cushman; Critical Essays on D.H. Lawrence with Fleda Brown Jackson, English; and D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady”: A New Look at “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” with Michael Squires. He also was associate editor with editor James C. Cowan of D. H. Lawrence: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him. A professional journalist with more than 10 years’ experience and currently director of UD’s Journalism Program, Jackson joined the Delaware faculty in 1978 and teaches mostly journalism classes. Unlike many professors, he said his research and interest in Lawrence and his teaching responsibilities in journalism have been unrelated. However, he currently is involved in a project that links his expertise in journalism and his literary interests. He is writing a book about Chuck Stone, a noted journalist with a colorful career who formerly taught at UD and is now at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Although they may seem miles apart, Jackson said, Stone, like Lawrence, is outspoken, irreverent and a gadfly, and issues of censorship cropped up in both their lives and work. The project, which received grants in 1999 from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the Freedom Forum, will take two more years to complete, Jackson said. –Sue Moncure