Rewriting the Literary Past: D. H. Lawrence and Geoff Dyer’s Antibiography

Why do memoirists, in order to find themselves, find it necessary to rewrite their favorite authors? This article explores this question by analyzing D. H. Lawrence and Geoff Dyer, who provide a case study for understanding the radical energies that burn beneath the surface of rewriting. The article traces Dyer’s conflicted attitude to memoir and rewriting back to Lawrence, who theorizes rewriting and puts it into practice in his own work, specifically in his Study of Thomas Hardy. If by now the book market is awash in rewrites, that is because rewriting first asserted itself as a contrarian impulse, a radically different way of thinking about the canon that has become second nature.