D. H. Lawrence and Ambivalence in the Age of Modernity

Rereading Midlands Novels and Wartime Writings in Social and Political Contexts
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-032-67566-4
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 234 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 498 g

Reihe: Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature

D. H. Lawrence is renowned for his scathing criticism of the ruling class, industrialisation of the country and wartime patriotism. However, his texts bear the imprint of contemporary dominant ideologies and discourses of the period. Comparing Lawrence’s texts to various major and minor contemporary novels, journal articles, political pamphlets and history books, this book aims to demonstrate that Lawrence’s texts are ambivalent: his texts harbour the dynamism of conflicting power struggles between the subversive and the reactionary. For example, in some apparently apolitical texts such as The White Peacock and Movements in European History, reactionary ideologies and wartime propaganda are embedded. Some texts like Lady Chatterley’s Lover are intended to be a radical critique of the period wherein it was composed, but they also bear discernible traces of the contemporary frame of reference that they intend to subvert. Focusing on Lawrence’s stories and novels set in the mining countryside and the works composed under the impact of the First World War, this book establishes that Lawrence’s texts in fact consist of multiple layers that are often in conflict with each other, serving as a testimony to the age of modernity.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Iwai, Gaku

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction

Annihilating Borders: Nature, Human Beings, Machinery in “Odour of Chrysanthemums”

 

Chapter 1.  Degeneration, Aestheticism and Empire: Middle-Class Ideology and

The White Peacock

 

Chapter 2.  Bestwood and the Morels under Evolution: Parallelism through Procreation and Evolution in Sons and Lovers

 

Chapter 3.  The Brangwens and Construction of the Towns in The Rainbow

 

Chapter 4.  Lawrence and War: Historical Contexts

I. Lawrence and the First World War

II. Lawrence and Anti-German Propaganda

III. History Books in Context

 

Chapter 5.  Wartime Discourses on War and Peace in Movements in European History

I. The Germanic Race

II. The Huns

III. The Unification of Germany

 

Chapter 6.  To Produce, or Not to Produce, That is the Question: Materialism, Democracy and War in Women in Love

 

Chapter 7.  Wartime Short Stories from “The Thimble” to “The Blind Man” and “Tickets Please”

I. Popular Wartime Romance and Lawrence’s Anti-Romance: Berta Ruck’s “The Infant-in Arms” and Lawrence’s “The Thimble”

II. The Path to Resurrection or Becoming a War Machine in “New Heaven and Earth”, “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani” and “England, My England”

III. Short Fiction in 1918: “The Fox”, “The Blind Man” and “Tickets Please”

 

Chapter 8.  Class Conflicts in Ambivalence from “Daughters of the Vicar” and “Hadrian” to Lady Chatterley’s Lover

I. Middle-Class Anxiety and its Solution in “Daughters of the Vicar”

II. Returned Soldier and Working-Class Threat in “Hadrian”

III. Lady Chatterley’s Lover: Temptation to the Bourgeois Myth

 

Epilogue.  Which Class Do Lawrence’s Texts Belong To?

Über Autor(innen)

Gaku Iwai is Professor of English at Konan University in Kobe, Japan. He is a co-editor and co-translator of the Japanese version of the Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, and the former chief editor of Japan D. H. Lawrence Studies. He has published numerous articles on D. H. Lawrence, J. M. Barrie, J. G. Ballard and Margaret Atwood, among others. He is also a co-author of several books on Lawrence and twentieth-century British writers, including D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).