This book demonstrates how D.H. Lawrence's prophetic ambitions impelled him to create novels that would radically transform the consciousness of his readers. Charles Burack argues that Lawrence's major novels, beginning with The Rainbow , are structured as religious initiation rites that attempt to break down the reader's normative mindset and to evoke new, numinous experiences of self and world. Through careful analysis of narrative structure, literary technique, and sacred discourses, Burack shows that Lawrence tries to initiate the reader into his own version of religious vitalism. Unlike most initiations that conclude with powerful affirmations, Lawrence's novels generally end with an attempt to subvert the formation of new religious dogmas and to encourage sacred-erotic exploration.

D. H. Lawrence wrote in 1914, 'Primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depths of my religious experience.' Although he had broken with the Congregationalist faith of his childhood by his early twenties, Lawrence remained throughout his writing life a passionately religious man. There have been studies in the last twenty years of certain aspects of Lawrence's religious writing, but we lack a survey of the history of his developing religious thought and of his expressions of that thought in his literary works. This book provides that survey, from 1915 to the end of Lawrence's life. Covering the war years, Lawrence's American works, his time in Australia and Mexico, and the works of the last years of his life, this book provides readers with a complete analysis, during this period, of Lawrence as a religious man, thinker and artist.

"In this study of the Lady Chatterley novels, Masami Nakabayashi pays particular attention to D.H. Lawrence's language for the feelings and for the life of the unselfconscious, sexual body. The novels constantly find ways of verbalising the characters' internalised experiences as they occur in states of unselfconsciousness. Lawrence's language for sensual feelings and emotions has always been regarded as simply 'sexual' and no previous critics have explored or made sense of the complexities of his peculiar, but extremely sophisticated, writing practice in the Lady Chatterley novels. Lawrence was a habitual reviser of his work, and, despite the availability of reliable texts in the Cambridge edition, few critics have traced the nature and significance of his changes from one draft to the next. By examining and analysing the novels' particular linguistic revisions, Masami Nakabayashi reveals the textual impulse behind Lawrence's original conception and its subsequent change and development"--Back cover.

This book discusses D. H. Lawrence’s interest in, and engagement with, transport as a literal and metaphorical focal point for his ontological concerns. Focusing on five key novels, this book explores issues of mobility, modernity and gender. First exploring how mechanized transportation reflects industry and patriarchy in Sons and Lovers, the book then considers issues of female mobility in The Rainbow, the signifying of war transport in Women in Love, revolution and the meeting of primitive and modern in The Plumed Serpent, and the reflection of dystopian post-war concerns in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Appealing to Lawrence, modernist, and mobilities researchers, this book is also of interest to readers interested in early twentieth century society, the First World War and transport history.

On the 15th of June 1921, during his stay in Baden-Baden, Germany, British novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) encountered the German physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955). Lawrence read an English translation of Relativity: The Special and General Theory, which had been published in the previous year. The very next day he wrote: “Einstein isn’t so metaphysically marvellous, but I like him for taking out the pin which fixed down our fluttering little physical universe” (4L 37). Lawrence’s first response to Einstein is ambivalent, for his reading of works by Victorian relativists such as Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, William James, Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel had helped him foster his own concept of relativity, while his representations of relativity had interacted with modern artists including Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp and Umberto Boccioni. This book shows Lawrence’s exploration of relativity in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European cultural climate of Modernism and examines his representation of relativity in Women in Love (1920), The Lost Girl (1920), Aaron’s Rod (1922) and The Fox (original version, 1920; revised version, 1922).

Winner of the DHLSNA Biennial Award for a Book by a Newly Published Scholar Exploring draft manuscripts, alternative texts and publishers' typescripts, The Many Drafts of D. H. Lawrence reveals new insights into the writings and writing practices of one of the most important writers of the 20th century. Focusing on the most productive years of Lawrence's writing life, between 1909 and 1926 – a time that saw the writing of major novels such as Women in Love and the controversial The Plumed Serpent, as well as his first major short story collection – this book is the first to apply analytical methods from the field of genetic criticism to the archives of this canonical modernist author. The book unearths and re-evaluates a variety of themes including the body, death, love, trauma, depression, memory, the sublime, selfhood, and endings, and includes original transcriptions as well as reproductions from the manuscripts themselves. By charting Lawrence's writing processes, the book also highlights how the very distinction between 'process' and 'product' became a central theme in his work.

In this exploration of the most innovative and iconoclastic modernist fiction, James J. Miracky studies the ways in which cultural forces and discourses of gender inflect the practice and theory of four British novelists: Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, May Sinclair, and D. H. Lawrence. Building on analyses of gender theory and formal innovation in Virginia Woolf's novels, this book examines Forster's queered use of fantasy, Sinclair's representation of manly genius in both male and female streams of consciousness, and Lawrence's quest for the novel of phallic consciousness. Reading each author's fiction alongside his or her theoretical writing, Miracky provides four diverse examples of how literary modernism wrestled with the gender crisis of the early twentieth century.

Exploring novels by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Sylvia Townsend Warner as political theology – works that imagine a resistance to the fusion of Christianity and patriotism which fuelled and supported the First World War – this book shows how we can gain valuable insights from their works for anti-militarist, anti-statist, and anti-nationalist efforts today. While none of the four novelists in this study were committed Christians during the 1920s, Andrews explores how their fiction written in the wake of the First World War operates theologically when it challenges English civil religion – the rituals of the nation that elevate the state to a form of divinity. Bringing these novels into a dialogue with recent political theologies by theorists and theologians including Giorgio Agamben, William Cavanaugh, Simon Critchley, Michel Foucault, Stanley Hauerwas and Jürgen Moltmann, this book shows the myriad ways that we can learn from the authors' theopolitical imaginations. Andrews demonstrates the many ways that these novelists issue a challenge to the problems with civil religion and the sacralized nation state and, in so doing, offer alternative visions to coordinate our inner lives with our public and collective actions.