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Alliance with tsarist Russia during the First World War presented a propaganda challenge for the British government: many believed that to support Russia against Germany was to support a barbarous nation against its own subjects, and to risk tipping the balance of power in Europe away from democracy. Russian literature was strategically deployed by the War Propaganda Bureau as evidence of Russia’s civilization, and writers and critics were marshalled to overturn the anti-tsarist interpretations of Russian literature put in place by the Russian populists. Russian literature now appeared in a new guise, read not through realism but symbolism, a movement introduced to Britain through the performances of the Ballets Russes, the travel writings of Stephen Graham, and reappraisals of Dostoevsky’s writings. The chapter concludes by examining the fiction of D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and John Middleton Murry, which resists wartime propaganda, and finds in Russian literature a critique of Western civilisation and its war.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.