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

Rereading Midlands Novels and Wartime Writings in Social and Political Contexts

Gaku Iwai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781032675664
• eBook ISBN: 9781040022757
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Degeneration, Aestheticism and Empire: Middle-Class Ideology and The White Peacock
• 2 Bestwood and the Morels under Evolution: Parallelism through Procreation and Evolution in Sons and Lovers
• 3 The Brangwens and Construction of the Towns in The Rainbow
• 4 Lawrence and War: Historical Contexts
• 5 Wartime Discourses on War and Peace in Movements in European History
• 6 To Produce, or Not to Produce, That Is the Question: Materialism, Democracy and War in Women in Love
• 7 Wartime Short Stories from “The Thimble” to “The Blind Man” and “Tickets Please”
• 8 Class Conflicts in Ambivalence from “Daughters of the Vicar” and “Hadrian” to Lady Chatterley’s Lover
• Epilogue: Which Class Do Lawrence’s Texts Belong To?
• Bibliography
• Index