Amit Chaudhuri and Tom Paulin
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199260522
- eISBN:
- 9780191698668
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199260522.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This study explores D. H. Lawrence's position as a ‘foreigner’ in the English canon. Focussing on poetry, the book examines how Lawrence's works, and Lawrence himself, have been read, and misread, in ...
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This study explores D. H. Lawrence's position as a ‘foreigner’ in the English canon. Focussing on poetry, the book examines how Lawrence's works, and Lawrence himself, have been read, and misread, in terms of their ‘difference.’ In contrast to the Leavisite project of placing Lawrence in the English ‘great tradition,’ this study demonstrates how Lawrence's writing brings into question the notion of ‘Englishness’ itself. It also shows how Lawrence's aesthetic set him apart radically from both his Modernist contemporaries and his Romantic forbears. The starting-point of this enquiry into Lawrentian ‘difference’ is, for the purposes of this study, the poetry, its stylistic features, the ways in which it has been read, and, importantly, it involves a search for a critical language by which the poetry, and its ‘difference’, might be addressed. In doing so, this book takes recourse to Jacques Derrida's notions of ‘grammatology’ and ‘ecriture’, and Michel Foucault's notion of ‘discourse’. Referring to Lawrence's travel writings about Mexico and Italy, his essays on European and Etruscan art, on Mexican marketplaces and rituals, and American literature, and especially to his poetic manifesto, ‘The Poetry of the Present,’ this book shows how Lawrence was working towards both a theory and a practice that critiqued the post-Enlightenment unitary European self. The book also, radically, allows a post-colonial identity to inform the reading of the poetry, and to let the poems enter into a conversation with that identity.Less
This study explores D. H. Lawrence's position as a ‘foreigner’ in the English canon. Focussing on poetry, the book examines how Lawrence's works, and Lawrence himself, have been read, and misread, in terms of their ‘difference.’ In contrast to the Leavisite project of placing Lawrence in the English ‘great tradition,’ this study demonstrates how Lawrence's writing brings into question the notion of ‘Englishness’ itself. It also shows how Lawrence's aesthetic set him apart radically from both his Modernist contemporaries and his Romantic forbears. The starting-point of this enquiry into Lawrentian ‘difference’ is, for the purposes of this study, the poetry, its stylistic features, the ways in which it has been read, and, importantly, it involves a search for a critical language by which the poetry, and its ‘difference’, might be addressed. In doing so, this book takes recourse to Jacques Derrida's notions of ‘grammatology’ and ‘ecriture’, and Michel Foucault's notion of ‘discourse’. Referring to Lawrence's travel writings about Mexico and Italy, his essays on European and Etruscan art, on Mexican marketplaces and rituals, and American literature, and especially to his poetic manifesto, ‘The Poetry of the Present,’ this book shows how Lawrence was working towards both a theory and a practice that critiqued the post-Enlightenment unitary European self. The book also, radically, allows a post-colonial identity to inform the reading of the poetry, and to let the poems enter into a conversation with that identity.
Gould Warwick and Reeves Marjorie
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199242306
- eISBN:
- 9780191697081
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199242306.003.0011
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity, Theology
In a broad sense this religious ambivalence, a movement between Christianity and a partially glimpsed religion of the future, is characteristic of all the visionary writers studied in this book. They ...
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In a broad sense this religious ambivalence, a movement between Christianity and a partially glimpsed religion of the future, is characteristic of all the visionary writers studied in this book. They were deeply religious, they passionately desired to build the future on a ‘religion of humanity’, yet they were estranged from the orthodoxy of the established churches. The mystical vision of Joachim of Fiore came to them as a prophetic voice from the past because it was rooted in the historical tradition which they could never altogether reject, because Joachim himself could be said to occupy this ambivalent orthodox/heretic position, and finally, because the symbol of the Eternal Evangel expressed so fully their own ardent dreams of an age of freedom and illumination. D. H. Lawrence wrote explicitly on Joachim and fastened on the movement of Joachimism as one of the significant ‘gestures’ of history. In spite of the gulf which separates them, there is an affinity between Lawrence and Joachim in their contemplation of duality and Trinity.Less
In a broad sense this religious ambivalence, a movement between Christianity and a partially glimpsed religion of the future, is characteristic of all the visionary writers studied in this book. They were deeply religious, they passionately desired to build the future on a ‘religion of humanity’, yet they were estranged from the orthodoxy of the established churches. The mystical vision of Joachim of Fiore came to them as a prophetic voice from the past because it was rooted in the historical tradition which they could never altogether reject, because Joachim himself could be said to occupy this ambivalent orthodox/heretic position, and finally, because the symbol of the Eternal Evangel expressed so fully their own ardent dreams of an age of freedom and illumination. D. H. Lawrence wrote explicitly on Joachim and fastened on the movement of Joachimism as one of the significant ‘gestures’ of history. In spite of the gulf which separates them, there is an affinity between Lawrence and Joachim in their contemplation of duality and Trinity.
Amit Chaudhuri
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199260522
- eISBN:
- 9780191698668
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199260522.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter looks at the creation and proposition of a Lawrentian aesthetic constructed and derived from the poet's own writings on art and culture. It also looks at the peculiarity of Lawrence's ...
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This chapter looks at the creation and proposition of a Lawrentian aesthetic constructed and derived from the poet's own writings on art and culture. It also looks at the peculiarity of Lawrence's ideas on culture and difference which rendered his poems marginalized and misunderstood on the canons of English language. It also examines Lawrence's ‘foreignness’; his perception of difference and his embodiment of it; his relationship to European culture; and his breaking away from conformity as exemplified in his poems. In the course of the discussion, the chapter also touches on the complicit agreement of modernist beliefs to the traditional set of beliefs with the aim to shed light on the aesthetic difference of Lawrence's poetics, in terms of politics, and the history and politics of difference as they have been outlined and substantiated in previous chapters.Less
This chapter looks at the creation and proposition of a Lawrentian aesthetic constructed and derived from the poet's own writings on art and culture. It also looks at the peculiarity of Lawrence's ideas on culture and difference which rendered his poems marginalized and misunderstood on the canons of English language. It also examines Lawrence's ‘foreignness’; his perception of difference and his embodiment of it; his relationship to European culture; and his breaking away from conformity as exemplified in his poems. In the course of the discussion, the chapter also touches on the complicit agreement of modernist beliefs to the traditional set of beliefs with the aim to shed light on the aesthetic difference of Lawrence's poetics, in terms of politics, and the history and politics of difference as they have been outlined and substantiated in previous chapters.
Lee M. Jenkins
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780813060507
- eISBN:
- 9780813050676
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813060507.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book posits an “American Lawrence,” exploring D. H. Lawrence’s role as a creator as well as a critic of American literature between 1922 and 1925 when he was resident in the New World. The ...
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This book posits an “American Lawrence,” exploring D. H. Lawrence’s role as a creator as well as a critic of American literature between 1922 and 1925 when he was resident in the New World. The American Lawrence, this book argues, ought to be included in the globalized definition of American literature which obtains in American Studies today. The book reconstructs Lawrence’s underexplored yet important relationship, as a poet, with transatlantic Imagism, with the local American modernism sponsored by Alfred Stieglitz and William Carlos Williams, and with the regional, New Mexico modernism promoted, among others, by Mary Austin and Alice Corbin Henderson. Lawrence’s American fictions—“St. Mawr,” “The Princess,” and “The Woman Who Rode Away”—are read here as incursions into the generic and gendered conventions of American literature (American Romance, the Indian captivity narrative) and as stories which register the complex, triethnic politics of northern New Mexico. This book also assesses Lawrence’s relationships, as collaborator, as male muse, and as antagonist, with women writers and painters in northern New Mexico, among them his hostess in Taos, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and the artists Dorothy Brett and Georgia O’Keeffe.Less
This book posits an “American Lawrence,” exploring D. H. Lawrence’s role as a creator as well as a critic of American literature between 1922 and 1925 when he was resident in the New World. The American Lawrence, this book argues, ought to be included in the globalized definition of American literature which obtains in American Studies today. The book reconstructs Lawrence’s underexplored yet important relationship, as a poet, with transatlantic Imagism, with the local American modernism sponsored by Alfred Stieglitz and William Carlos Williams, and with the regional, New Mexico modernism promoted, among others, by Mary Austin and Alice Corbin Henderson. Lawrence’s American fictions—“St. Mawr,” “The Princess,” and “The Woman Who Rode Away”—are read here as incursions into the generic and gendered conventions of American literature (American Romance, the Indian captivity narrative) and as stories which register the complex, triethnic politics of northern New Mexico. This book also assesses Lawrence’s relationships, as collaborator, as male muse, and as antagonist, with women writers and painters in northern New Mexico, among them his hostess in Taos, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and the artists Dorothy Brett and Georgia O’Keeffe.
Kirsty Martin
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199674084
- eISBN:
- 9780191752124
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199674084.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter traces D. H. Lawrence's changing conception of sympathy across his works, exploring how it is shaped by a vitalist understanding of the body. It explores how for Lawrence sympathy might ...
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This chapter traces D. H. Lawrence's changing conception of sympathy across his works, exploring how it is shaped by a vitalist understanding of the body. It explores how for Lawrence sympathy might be akin to desire. It also explores the ethical and aesthetic difficulties evident in his version of sympathy: basing sympathy on the body can risk drawing people so close that there is no space for individuality, and it can also allow for cruelty. These aesthetic and ethical difficulties are most evident in The Plumed Serpent. Yet this chapter shows that in Lady Chatterley's Lover Lawrence returns to a sense of sensual sympathy and urges that a form of bodily, intuitive tenderness is finally irrepressible. In addition to The Plumed Serpent and Lady Chatterley's Lover, the chapter includes close readings of The Rainbow and Women in Love.Less
This chapter traces D. H. Lawrence's changing conception of sympathy across his works, exploring how it is shaped by a vitalist understanding of the body. It explores how for Lawrence sympathy might be akin to desire. It also explores the ethical and aesthetic difficulties evident in his version of sympathy: basing sympathy on the body can risk drawing people so close that there is no space for individuality, and it can also allow for cruelty. These aesthetic and ethical difficulties are most evident in The Plumed Serpent. Yet this chapter shows that in Lady Chatterley's Lover Lawrence returns to a sense of sensual sympathy and urges that a form of bodily, intuitive tenderness is finally irrepressible. In addition to The Plumed Serpent and Lady Chatterley's Lover, the chapter includes close readings of The Rainbow and Women in Love.
Mark Kinkead-Weekes
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197263181
- eISBN:
- 9780191734595
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197263181.003.0014
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
There could be different ways of writing biographies, just as there are different kinds of novels. Modern biographers who are sensitive to the trends in fiction and criticism may avoid the ...
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There could be different ways of writing biographies, just as there are different kinds of novels. Modern biographers who are sensitive to the trends in fiction and criticism may avoid the chronological approach, as it is often seen as old-fashioned. They may prefer a more subtle kind of structuring; for instance, Hermione Lee, who wrote Virginia Woolf's life, argued that there are several ways in which a ‘Life’ may begin apart from the start of the subject's birth. Likewise, Jean Sartre asserted the need to use an inverted chronology wherein regression should come first before progress can be properly grounded. This chapter discusses the chronological biography and, in particular, strict chronological biography. First, it examines D.H. Lawrence's biography, which is arranged and structured chronologically, and considers two biographies that are arranged in innovatory ways: Sartre's biography of Flaubert and Lee's narrative of Virginia Woolf. While Sartre and Lee's methods were interesting, the chronological approach, however old-fashioned, has positive aspects: it allows miming of the reader of how a life may have felt to live; throws emphasis on the experience of the biographee rather than commentary of the biographer; allows the reader to watch the life as it unfolds rather than having its significance anticipated; and delays verdicts until there has been sufficient exploration of the process and development.Less
There could be different ways of writing biographies, just as there are different kinds of novels. Modern biographers who are sensitive to the trends in fiction and criticism may avoid the chronological approach, as it is often seen as old-fashioned. They may prefer a more subtle kind of structuring; for instance, Hermione Lee, who wrote Virginia Woolf's life, argued that there are several ways in which a ‘Life’ may begin apart from the start of the subject's birth. Likewise, Jean Sartre asserted the need to use an inverted chronology wherein regression should come first before progress can be properly grounded. This chapter discusses the chronological biography and, in particular, strict chronological biography. First, it examines D.H. Lawrence's biography, which is arranged and structured chronologically, and considers two biographies that are arranged in innovatory ways: Sartre's biography of Flaubert and Lee's narrative of Virginia Woolf. While Sartre and Lee's methods were interesting, the chronological approach, however old-fashioned, has positive aspects: it allows miming of the reader of how a life may have felt to live; throws emphasis on the experience of the biographee rather than commentary of the biographer; allows the reader to watch the life as it unfolds rather than having its significance anticipated; and delays verdicts until there has been sufficient exploration of the process and development.
Nicholas Royle
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748636549
- eISBN:
- 9780748652303
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748636549.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
D. H. Lawrence's reputation has veered. The reputation of his work can never return to what it was, when the canon of ‘literature in English’ was primarily a gathering of dead white men and there was ...
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D. H. Lawrence's reputation has veered. The reputation of his work can never return to what it was, when the canon of ‘literature in English’ was primarily a gathering of dead white men and there was little or no critical reflection on questions of misogyny or the dominance of ‘phallic consciousness’. The theory of veering offers a fuller and more variegated conception of the swerve or clinamen that Harold Bloom regards as a tropological feature of the rhetorical composition of strong poems. Veering with Lawrence is a matter of reading him as a contemporary. Veering with Lawrence has first and foremost to do with the texture and detail of his language. Lawrence is interested in veering as a strategy of avoiding. Veering with Lawrence has to do with machines and stars, beasts and flowers, as much as humans. It finally discusses Tortoise Family Connections.Less
D. H. Lawrence's reputation has veered. The reputation of his work can never return to what it was, when the canon of ‘literature in English’ was primarily a gathering of dead white men and there was little or no critical reflection on questions of misogyny or the dominance of ‘phallic consciousness’. The theory of veering offers a fuller and more variegated conception of the swerve or clinamen that Harold Bloom regards as a tropological feature of the rhetorical composition of strong poems. Veering with Lawrence is a matter of reading him as a contemporary. Veering with Lawrence has first and foremost to do with the texture and detail of his language. Lawrence is interested in veering as a strategy of avoiding. Veering with Lawrence has to do with machines and stars, beasts and flowers, as much as humans. It finally discusses Tortoise Family Connections.
Amit Chaudhuri
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199260522
- eISBN:
- 9780191698668
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199260522.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter talks about the intertextuality of the poems of D. H. Lawrence. Bordering on the unconventional, most of the poems of D. H. Lawrence are not formally perfected in the Yeatsian sense — ...
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This chapter talks about the intertextuality of the poems of D. H. Lawrence. Bordering on the unconventional, most of the poems of D. H. Lawrence are not formally perfected in the Yeatsian sense — they are verbal, informal, unfinished, and have gaps. Lawrentian poems also exist in two or more versions, each displaying successes and shortcomings, where the earlier poems seemed to be haunted and reminiscent of the latter versions. Hence, this chapter is dedicated the first half to the decoding of the meaning attached to poems by connecting them to other related poems. The latter part of the chapter tackles the question of authorship and control in which the nature of Lawrence's revisions and repetitions arises. In the first part of the chapter, the discussion evolves on the usage of intertextuality in a general way while the latter part focuses on the ‘doubleness’ of Lawrence's works by concentrating the repetitions, the textual materiality, and the redundant images present in the poems. While examining the open-endedness of the poems and the nature of the revisions made by Lawrence, the chapter also tackles the inadequacy of the New Critical ideas in relation to Lawrentian discourse.Less
This chapter talks about the intertextuality of the poems of D. H. Lawrence. Bordering on the unconventional, most of the poems of D. H. Lawrence are not formally perfected in the Yeatsian sense — they are verbal, informal, unfinished, and have gaps. Lawrentian poems also exist in two or more versions, each displaying successes and shortcomings, where the earlier poems seemed to be haunted and reminiscent of the latter versions. Hence, this chapter is dedicated the first half to the decoding of the meaning attached to poems by connecting them to other related poems. The latter part of the chapter tackles the question of authorship and control in which the nature of Lawrence's revisions and repetitions arises. In the first part of the chapter, the discussion evolves on the usage of intertextuality in a general way while the latter part focuses on the ‘doubleness’ of Lawrence's works by concentrating the repetitions, the textual materiality, and the redundant images present in the poems. While examining the open-endedness of the poems and the nature of the revisions made by Lawrence, the chapter also tackles the inadequacy of the New Critical ideas in relation to Lawrentian discourse.
Amit Chaudhuri
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199260522
- eISBN:
- 9780191698668
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199260522.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This conclusion draws attention to two important points raised in the previous chapters. The first one is Lawrence's exploration of ‘difference’ in his work. The second one is what it means to study ...
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This conclusion draws attention to two important points raised in the previous chapters. The first one is Lawrence's exploration of ‘difference’ in his work. The second one is what it means to study and examine Lawrence and English literature.Less
This conclusion draws attention to two important points raised in the previous chapters. The first one is Lawrence's exploration of ‘difference’ in his work. The second one is what it means to study and examine Lawrence and English literature.
Sam Wiseman
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780990895886
- eISBN:
- 9781786945228
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780990895886.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter argues that D.H. Lawrence’s relationship with place and nonhuman life is profoundly influenced by underlying tensions and contradictions in his worldview, in terms of his relationships ...
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This chapter argues that D.H. Lawrence’s relationship with place and nonhuman life is profoundly influenced by underlying tensions and contradictions in his worldview, in terms of his relationships with family, religion, gender and class. It begins by tracing such tensions in The White Peacock (1911), before examining the development of a multiple perspective, dialogue-heavy approach in Sons and Lovers (1913). In his later work, as his focus shifts to nonhuman life, other tensions emerge, between two related pairings: unity versus fragmentation, and the individual versus the communal. The strain of misanthropy that runs through Lawrence’s writing lends itself to the development of these themes. In some ways, texts like Women in Love (1920) reveal a desire to reject the possibilities of a cosmopolitan, multi-voiced openness and liminality that much of Lawrence’s work otherwise suggests. His distinctive socio-cultural position means that his work initiates and explores many of the central themes and issues raised by the relationships between English modernity, modernism and place; but its multiple contradictions and dualisms are never satisfactorily resolved or overcome.Less
This chapter argues that D.H. Lawrence’s relationship with place and nonhuman life is profoundly influenced by underlying tensions and contradictions in his worldview, in terms of his relationships with family, religion, gender and class. It begins by tracing such tensions in The White Peacock (1911), before examining the development of a multiple perspective, dialogue-heavy approach in Sons and Lovers (1913). In his later work, as his focus shifts to nonhuman life, other tensions emerge, between two related pairings: unity versus fragmentation, and the individual versus the communal. The strain of misanthropy that runs through Lawrence’s writing lends itself to the development of these themes. In some ways, texts like Women in Love (1920) reveal a desire to reject the possibilities of a cosmopolitan, multi-voiced openness and liminality that much of Lawrence’s work otherwise suggests. His distinctive socio-cultural position means that his work initiates and explores many of the central themes and issues raised by the relationships between English modernity, modernism and place; but its multiple contradictions and dualisms are never satisfactorily resolved or overcome.
Michael Bell
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199208098
- eISBN:
- 9780191709227
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199208098.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature, European Literature
This chapter suggests that D. H. Lawrence is the most significant inheritor of the Nietzschean problematic of Bildung. Through a discussion mainly of Women in Love, the chapter brings out his ...
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This chapter suggests that D. H. Lawrence is the most significant inheritor of the Nietzschean problematic of Bildung. Through a discussion mainly of Women in Love, the chapter brings out his similarities and differences with respect to both Nietzsche and Goethe. This novel, by attempting a radical and comprehensive critique of modern social man, focuses Lawrence' authentic impasse of readerly understanding. After it he developed a style of frankly personal quest novels in which his writerly authority was explicitly eccentric and beleaguered in the contemporary world. The difficulty of sharing understanding, which was to some extent a successful rhetorical feint in the earlier writers, has become a more literal impasse, and this was vividly confirmed by Lawrence's unpopularity in the ideologically dominated academy of the twentieth century's last three decades.Less
This chapter suggests that D. H. Lawrence is the most significant inheritor of the Nietzschean problematic of Bildung. Through a discussion mainly of Women in Love, the chapter brings out his similarities and differences with respect to both Nietzsche and Goethe. This novel, by attempting a radical and comprehensive critique of modern social man, focuses Lawrence' authentic impasse of readerly understanding. After it he developed a style of frankly personal quest novels in which his writerly authority was explicitly eccentric and beleaguered in the contemporary world. The difficulty of sharing understanding, which was to some extent a successful rhetorical feint in the earlier writers, has become a more literal impasse, and this was vividly confirmed by Lawrence's unpopularity in the ideologically dominated academy of the twentieth century's last three decades.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter asks whether the kind of reading offered in the previous chapter disarms the possibility of modernist satire, deflecting our attention from criticism to autobiography. It discusses two ...
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This chapter asks whether the kind of reading offered in the previous chapter disarms the possibility of modernist satire, deflecting our attention from criticism to autobiography. It discusses two less equivocally satirical modernists by way of counter‐arguments to this objection. Wyndham Lewis's Time and Western Man contains some of the most forceful modernist attacks on the auto/biographic; yet Lewis offers the book as itself a kind of intellectual self‐portrait. Conversely, Richard Aldington's Soft Answers is read as a portrait‐collection, adopting modernist parodies of auto/biography in order to satirize modernists such as Eliot and Pound. It argues that (as in the case of Pound, and according to the argument introduced in the Preface) not only can satire be auto/biography, but auto/biography can also be satire. Indeed, Pound was shown in Chapter 9 to be writing both in verse; and in the Chapter 11 Woolf is shown to do both in prose. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the First World War transformed the crisis in life ‐ writing.Less
This chapter asks whether the kind of reading offered in the previous chapter disarms the possibility of modernist satire, deflecting our attention from criticism to autobiography. It discusses two less equivocally satirical modernists by way of counter‐arguments to this objection. Wyndham Lewis's Time and Western Man contains some of the most forceful modernist attacks on the auto/biographic; yet Lewis offers the book as itself a kind of intellectual self‐portrait. Conversely, Richard Aldington's Soft Answers is read as a portrait‐collection, adopting modernist parodies of auto/biography in order to satirize modernists such as Eliot and Pound. It argues that (as in the case of Pound, and according to the argument introduced in the Preface) not only can satire be auto/biography, but auto/biography can also be satire. Indeed, Pound was shown in Chapter 9 to be writing both in verse; and in the Chapter 11 Woolf is shown to do both in prose. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the First World War transformed the crisis in life ‐ writing.
Sean Latham
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195379990
- eISBN:
- 9780199869053
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195379990.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The continuing expansion of the mass media in the 20th century, and particularly the emergence of mass-mediated celebrity culture, meant that an ever-growing audience imagined they had access to even ...
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The continuing expansion of the mass media in the 20th century, and particularly the emergence of mass-mediated celebrity culture, meant that an ever-growing audience imagined they had access to even the most exclusive circles. Uniquely positioned to exploit this fraught tension between the public and the private, the roman à clef became an increasingly popular genre, catering to a market hungry for scandal and snobbery. This chapter focuses narrowly on two such coteries, one in England and the other in Paris. The first organized itself around the imposing figure of Lady Ottoline Morrell, who, despite her generosity, was frequently satirized in romans à clef by D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and others. Far from simpleminded acts of revenge, these works deliberately exploit the genre in order to escape the hermetic aestheticism of highbrow modernism and thus reap the considerable rewards of the wider literary marketplace. In expatriate Paris, Jean Rhys deployed the roman à clef in similarly strategic ways, using the masochistic protagonist in Quartet to attack Ford Madox Ford’s misogynistic bohemianism. Poised at the boundary between public and private, the roman à clef thrives at the intersection between gender, genre, modernism, and celebrity.Less
The continuing expansion of the mass media in the 20th century, and particularly the emergence of mass-mediated celebrity culture, meant that an ever-growing audience imagined they had access to even the most exclusive circles. Uniquely positioned to exploit this fraught tension between the public and the private, the roman à clef became an increasingly popular genre, catering to a market hungry for scandal and snobbery. This chapter focuses narrowly on two such coteries, one in England and the other in Paris. The first organized itself around the imposing figure of Lady Ottoline Morrell, who, despite her generosity, was frequently satirized in romans à clef by D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and others. Far from simpleminded acts of revenge, these works deliberately exploit the genre in order to escape the hermetic aestheticism of highbrow modernism and thus reap the considerable rewards of the wider literary marketplace. In expatriate Paris, Jean Rhys deployed the roman à clef in similarly strategic ways, using the masochistic protagonist in Quartet to attack Ford Madox Ford’s misogynistic bohemianism. Poised at the boundary between public and private, the roman à clef thrives at the intersection between gender, genre, modernism, and celebrity.
Andrew Frayn
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780719089220
- eISBN:
- 9781781707333
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719089220.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf are unlikely subjects for comparision, but both were non-combatant authors profoundly disillusioned by the war. Both are concerned with issues of gender and seek to ...
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D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf are unlikely subjects for comparision, but both were non-combatant authors profoundly disillusioned by the war. Both are concerned with issues of gender and seek to break from the pre-war hierarchies, although the changes they desire are radically opposed. Lawrence opposes the war from its beginning, and the way it leads to an increasingly authoritarian state, famously fictionalised in Kangaroo. His compelling, dissenting prose expresses revulsion at the impact of mechanisation and mass culture in fictional and non-fictional prose. Those anxieties reach a peak in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, still in 1928 clearly a response to the war. Woolf is equally concerned about mass culture. She rarely focuses on the war, but it is an absent presence in her nineteen twenties work. Mrs Dalloway offers the clearest comment on the iniquities of the war, but Jacob’s Room is a literary cenotaph, the title character out of view at its centre; To the Lighthouse is similarly haunted by parenthetical deaths. Both authors seek to mobilise disenchantment with the war as a catalyst for positive change.Less
D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf are unlikely subjects for comparision, but both were non-combatant authors profoundly disillusioned by the war. Both are concerned with issues of gender and seek to break from the pre-war hierarchies, although the changes they desire are radically opposed. Lawrence opposes the war from its beginning, and the way it leads to an increasingly authoritarian state, famously fictionalised in Kangaroo. His compelling, dissenting prose expresses revulsion at the impact of mechanisation and mass culture in fictional and non-fictional prose. Those anxieties reach a peak in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, still in 1928 clearly a response to the war. Woolf is equally concerned about mass culture. She rarely focuses on the war, but it is an absent presence in her nineteen twenties work. Mrs Dalloway offers the clearest comment on the iniquities of the war, but Jacob’s Room is a literary cenotaph, the title character out of view at its centre; To the Lighthouse is similarly haunted by parenthetical deaths. Both authors seek to mobilise disenchantment with the war as a catalyst for positive change.
Fernihough Anne
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112358
- eISBN:
- 9780191670770
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112358.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The term ‘aesthetics’, in its Greek derivation, denotes the study of sense experience rather than the study of art. It is not surprising, therefore, that when aesthetics was founded as a discrete ...
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The term ‘aesthetics’, in its Greek derivation, denotes the study of sense experience rather than the study of art. It is not surprising, therefore, that when aesthetics was founded as a discrete discipline by Alexander Baumgarten in 1735, it focused attention on experiences, perceptions, and judgements of the beautiful, all of which referred primarily to the responding subject, not to the art-work itself. Immanuel Kant, in categorizing aesthetic judgements as ‘judgements of taste’, located the aesthetic squarely within the experiencing subject rather than the artefact. In the Critique of Judgement (1790), he argued that judgements of taste are concerned not with the object as such, but with the pleasure or pain experienced by the subject. D. H. Lawrence almost always uses the term ‘aesthetic’ pejoratively, with an acute awareness of the subjectivist standpoint of traditional art theory. For Lawrence, things themselves have been the blind spot of mainstream aesthetic philosophy.Less
The term ‘aesthetics’, in its Greek derivation, denotes the study of sense experience rather than the study of art. It is not surprising, therefore, that when aesthetics was founded as a discrete discipline by Alexander Baumgarten in 1735, it focused attention on experiences, perceptions, and judgements of the beautiful, all of which referred primarily to the responding subject, not to the art-work itself. Immanuel Kant, in categorizing aesthetic judgements as ‘judgements of taste’, located the aesthetic squarely within the experiencing subject rather than the artefact. In the Critique of Judgement (1790), he argued that judgements of taste are concerned not with the object as such, but with the pleasure or pain experienced by the subject. D. H. Lawrence almost always uses the term ‘aesthetic’ pejoratively, with an acute awareness of the subjectivist standpoint of traditional art theory. For Lawrence, things themselves have been the blind spot of mainstream aesthetic philosophy.
Fernihough Anne
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112358
- eISBN:
- 9780191670770
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112358.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
During the period 1913–1918, D. H. Lawrence was preoccupied with various anthropological works. During the same period, Sigmund Freud had been concerning himself, in his 1915 paper ‘The Unconscious’, ...
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During the period 1913–1918, D. H. Lawrence was preoccupied with various anthropological works. During the same period, Sigmund Freud had been concerning himself, in his 1915 paper ‘The Unconscious’, with the ‘aboriginal population’ inhabiting what he would later call, in his New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933), the ‘internal foreign territory’ of the mind. Freud likened his researches, in a well-known analogy, to the unearthing of the long-buried relics of Pompeii. For Freud, Pompeii's destruction denotes cure, an unearthing of the repressed wishes that have been causing the patient's neurosis or hysteria. For Lawrence, the image of plundered tombs would, one suspects, have had a very different resonance. In 1921, Lawrence published his bitter indictment of Freud. It is then necessary to ask why Lawrence was so hostile towards Freudian theory.Less
During the period 1913–1918, D. H. Lawrence was preoccupied with various anthropological works. During the same period, Sigmund Freud had been concerning himself, in his 1915 paper ‘The Unconscious’, with the ‘aboriginal population’ inhabiting what he would later call, in his New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933), the ‘internal foreign territory’ of the mind. Freud likened his researches, in a well-known analogy, to the unearthing of the long-buried relics of Pompeii. For Freud, Pompeii's destruction denotes cure, an unearthing of the repressed wishes that have been causing the patient's neurosis or hysteria. For Lawrence, the image of plundered tombs would, one suspects, have had a very different resonance. In 1921, Lawrence published his bitter indictment of Freud. It is then necessary to ask why Lawrence was so hostile towards Freudian theory.
Fernihough Anne
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112358
- eISBN:
- 9780191670770
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112358.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Clive Bell's Art (1914), one of the key texts of Bloomsbury art-criticism, is at best an incoherent work and, at worst, a disturbingly elitist one. Peter Fuller, in Art and Psychoanalysis, is harshly ...
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Clive Bell's Art (1914), one of the key texts of Bloomsbury art-criticism, is at best an incoherent work and, at worst, a disturbingly elitist one. Peter Fuller, in Art and Psychoanalysis, is harshly critical of it in ways that few people would wish to question, attacking Bell as ‘opinionated, arrogant, ultimately downright reactionary’, yet nonetheless finding in Bell's theory ‘kernels of truth’ that can shed light on his own arguments. In spite of its faults, Bell's Art is an important text for the student of D. H. Lawrence's art-criticism. Lawrence had many direct and indirect connections with Bloomsbury, and Bell and Roger Fry are two of the very few art-critics he takes the trouble to criticize overly. In fact, his attack on Bloomsbury aesthetics is vociferous and uncompromising. As a result, literary history has generally defined Lawrence's views on art in opposition to those of Bloomsbury, which is not the most fruitful way of approaching the art-criticism of either camp.Less
Clive Bell's Art (1914), one of the key texts of Bloomsbury art-criticism, is at best an incoherent work and, at worst, a disturbingly elitist one. Peter Fuller, in Art and Psychoanalysis, is harshly critical of it in ways that few people would wish to question, attacking Bell as ‘opinionated, arrogant, ultimately downright reactionary’, yet nonetheless finding in Bell's theory ‘kernels of truth’ that can shed light on his own arguments. In spite of its faults, Bell's Art is an important text for the student of D. H. Lawrence's art-criticism. Lawrence had many direct and indirect connections with Bloomsbury, and Bell and Roger Fry are two of the very few art-critics he takes the trouble to criticize overly. In fact, his attack on Bloomsbury aesthetics is vociferous and uncompromising. As a result, literary history has generally defined Lawrence's views on art in opposition to those of Bloomsbury, which is not the most fruitful way of approaching the art-criticism of either camp.
Elizabeth Outka
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195372694
- eISBN:
- 9780199871704
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195372694.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
The conclusion argues that the history and development of the commodified authentic are key to understanding later works of high modernism, as well as our contemporary moment, with its strangely ...
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The conclusion argues that the history and development of the commodified authentic are key to understanding later works of high modernism, as well as our contemporary moment, with its strangely hybridized blend of nostalgia and modernity. The chapter investigates how the commodified authentic became a critical modernist tool, analyzing key moments concerning advertising, authenticity, and shopping in works by D. H. Lawrence (Women in Love), James Joyce (Ulysses), and Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse). The chapter concludes by exploring how the commodified authentic remains a powerful marketing technique and cultural strategy.Less
The conclusion argues that the history and development of the commodified authentic are key to understanding later works of high modernism, as well as our contemporary moment, with its strangely hybridized blend of nostalgia and modernity. The chapter investigates how the commodified authentic became a critical modernist tool, analyzing key moments concerning advertising, authenticity, and shopping in works by D. H. Lawrence (Women in Love), James Joyce (Ulysses), and Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse). The chapter concludes by exploring how the commodified authentic remains a powerful marketing technique and cultural strategy.
Chris Baldick
- Published in print:
- 1990
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122494
- eISBN:
- 9780191671432
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122494.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
H. G. Wells may have brought the Frankenstein myth's fictional exploitation to one kind of dead end in The Invisible Man, but in The Island of Doctor Moreau he had opened it out in another direction ...
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H. G. Wells may have brought the Frankenstein myth's fictional exploitation to one kind of dead end in The Invisible Man, but in The Island of Doctor Moreau he had opened it out in another direction already foreshadowed by the colonial setting of Samuel Butler's Erewhon. Moreau's island settlement, like Prospero's before it, is a colony, and his efforts to ‘raise’ his Beast Folk to his own condition reflect in macabre form the cruelties and dangers of late-Victorian imperialism and its ‘civilizing mission’. In English fiction, the most powerfully imaginative extension of the Frankenstein myth to this imperialist period and to the forces at work in it, which would spill out of control in the wars and revolutions of 1914–1918, are to be found in the work of Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence.Less
H. G. Wells may have brought the Frankenstein myth's fictional exploitation to one kind of dead end in The Invisible Man, but in The Island of Doctor Moreau he had opened it out in another direction already foreshadowed by the colonial setting of Samuel Butler's Erewhon. Moreau's island settlement, like Prospero's before it, is a colony, and his efforts to ‘raise’ his Beast Folk to his own condition reflect in macabre form the cruelties and dangers of late-Victorian imperialism and its ‘civilizing mission’. In English fiction, the most powerfully imaginative extension of the Frankenstein myth to this imperialist period and to the forces at work in it, which would spill out of control in the wars and revolutions of 1914–1918, are to be found in the work of Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence.
Fernihough Anne
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112358
- eISBN:
- 9780191670770
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112358.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter examines Lawrence's concept of aesthetics, allegory, and symbol. The organic metaphor is a particularly complex and confusing one because it aspires to transcend its own metaphoric ...
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This chapter examines Lawrence's concept of aesthetics, allegory, and symbol. The organic metaphor is a particularly complex and confusing one because it aspires to transcend its own metaphoric status, suggesting that melding of language and the natural world that Paul de Man saw to be the characteristic strategy of ideology. To say that a poem is a rose seems to be very different from saying that a poem is organic, and yet on one level they are equivalent statements. Christopher Norris and de Man state their arguments, but it is easy to see how D. H. Lawrence can turn such an argument on its head, arguing that it is in fact rational or scientific discourse, with its pretensions to disinterestedness, which employs what people would today call ‘the ideology of the natural’, which forgets its own rhetorical or metaphorical status and claims to be talking about the world as it is.Less
This chapter examines Lawrence's concept of aesthetics, allegory, and symbol. The organic metaphor is a particularly complex and confusing one because it aspires to transcend its own metaphoric status, suggesting that melding of language and the natural world that Paul de Man saw to be the characteristic strategy of ideology. To say that a poem is a rose seems to be very different from saying that a poem is organic, and yet on one level they are equivalent statements. Christopher Norris and de Man state their arguments, but it is easy to see how D. H. Lawrence can turn such an argument on its head, arguing that it is in fact rational or scientific discourse, with its pretensions to disinterestedness, which employs what people would today call ‘the ideology of the natural’, which forgets its own rhetorical or metaphorical status and claims to be talking about the world as it is.