The Plumed Serpent is set in Mexico in the 1920s, an era of political turmoil, and centres on a revolutionary movement to revive the religion of the ancient Aztecs. The brilliant vision of place, the
This book is a critical edition of D. H. Lawrence's complete essays about Mexican and Southwestern Indians, both those published in 1927 as Mornings in Mexico, and the other essays Lawrence wrote about them during his American years. The number of essays, therefore, is more than double that of all previous editions. The early version of 'Pan in America' appears here for the first time, as do previously unpublished passages in other essays. The texts are informed by all extant manuscripts, typescripts, and early publications, with a full textual apparatus revealing Lawrence's revisions. The volume includes extensive notes and appendices with information on Mesoamerican mythology and history. Lawrence's interest in and real affection for the region and its peoples went beyond the travel writing genre and these essays hold significance not only for those interested in Lawrence but also in the wider context of the cultures of Mexico and the Southwest.
Lawrence's first novel The White Peacock was begun in 1906, rewritten three times, and published in 1911. The Cambridge edition uses the final manuscript as base-text, and faithfully recovers Lawrence
Lawrence composed and revised poems from 1905 to 1930, and had collections of poems published from 1913 to 1932. Volume 3 includes his uncollected poems and many early versions; versions in his first two collections, Love Poems and Others and Amores, are published in full. The chronological ordering of uncollected poems and early versions in this volume makes developments in theme and style readily traceable and offers new perspectives on each period of his verse-writing. The perspective offered by the last poems Lawrence wrote in the USA, 'O! Americans!' and 'Change of Life', differs from that of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, for example, and the two last poems that Lawrence composed are prose poems, uncollected in The Last Poems Notebook. All manuscript and notebook verse is freshly transcribed, and all poems are fully annotated and critically edited in this, the fortieth and final volume in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence.
