This book is a study of D. H. Lawrence's view of nature, his ecological consciousness contributes to his unique place within modern aesthetics. An affinity has been examined between Lawrence's ideology of man-nature relationship and the classic oriental philosophies concerning nature, particularly the ancient Taoism. In Lawrence's novels and essays one finds that virtually all aspects of his religious vision are anticipated in Eastern literature. His almighty Holy Ghost, for example, who is responsible for the sacred underlying unity, is named Brahman by Hindus, Dharmakaya by Buddhists, and Tao by Taoists. His duality, with its stress on the dynamic balance between complementary life-principles, is fully worked out in the Yin-Yang philosophy of Taoism.
This book will change the way you think about D. H. Lawrence. Critics have tried to define him as a Georgian poet, an imagist, a vitalist, a follower of the French symbolists, a romantic or a transcendentalist, but none of the usual labels fit. The same theme runs through all his work, beginning with his very first novel, The White Peacock, and ending with the last line of his final book, Apocalypse. Always it is nature. He said this over and over again, and no one - especially those who feared the "old ways" of harmonious and balanced living on the earth - understood him.
The first full-length account of D.H. Lawrence’s rich engagement with a country he found both fascinating and frustrating, D.H. Lawrence’s Australia focuses on the philosophical, anthropological and literary influences that informed the utopian and regenerative visions that characterise so much of Lawrence’s work. David Game gives particular attention to the four novels and one novella published between 1920 and 1925, what Game calls Lawrence’s 'Australian period,' shedding new light on Lawrence’s attitudes towards Australia in general and, more specifically, towards Australian Aborigines, women and colonialism. He revisits key aspects of Lawrence’s development as a novelist and thinker, including the influence of Darwin and Lawrence’s rejection of eugenics, Christianity, psychoanalysis and science. While Game concentrates on the Australian novels such as Kangaroo and The Boy in the Bush, he also uncovers the Australian elements in a range of other works, including Lawrence’s last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence lived in Australia for just three months, but as Game shows, it played a significant role in his quest for a way of life that would enable regeneration of the individual in the face of what Lawrence saw as the moral collapse of modern industrial civilisation after the outbreak of World War I.
"Highly informative and remarkably entertaining." —Elle From forest trails in Korea, to islands in Finland, to eucalyptus groves in California, Florence Williams investigates the science behind nature’s positive effects on the brain. Delving into brand-new research, she uncovers the powers of the natural world to improve health, promote reflection and innovation, and strengthen our relationships. As our modern lives shift dramatically indoors, these ideas—and the answers they yield—are more urgent than ever.
You could describe D.H. Lawrence as the great multi-instrumentalist among the great writers of the twentieth century. He was a brilliant, endlessly controversial novelist who transformed, for better and for worse, the way we write about sex and emotions; he was a wonderful poet; he was an essayist of burning curiosity, expansive lyricism, odd humor, and radical intelligence, equaled, perhaps, only by Virginia Woolf. Here Geoff Dyer, one of the finest essayists of our day, draws on the whole range of Lawrence’s published essays to reintroduce him to a new generation of readers for whom the essay has become an important genre. We get Lawrence the book reviewer, writing about Death in Venice and welcoming Ernest Hemingway; Lawrence the travel writer, in Mexico and New Mexico and Italy; Lawrence the memoirist, depicting his strange sometime-friend Maurice Magnus; Lawrence the restless inquirer into the possibilities of the novel, writing about the novel and morality and addressing the question of why the novel matters; and, finally, the Lawrence who meditates on birdsong or the death of a porcupine in the Rocky Mountains. Dyer’s selection of Lawrence’s essays is a wonderful introduction to a fundamental, dazzling writer.
Prologue -- Introduction. The Trouble with Ecological Homecoming -- Part 1. 1. Martin Heidegger and the Coloniality of Nature -- 2. Willa Cather and the Home(l)y Metaphysics of Landscape -- 3. D. H. Lawrence and the Ecological Uncanny -- Excursus I. Ecological Realism -- Part 2. 4. (Un)settling the Southern African Farm/world -- 5. Allegory, Realism, and Uncanny Ecology on Olive Schreiner's African Farm -- 6. Doris Lessing's Ecological Realism -- Excursus II. Exo-Phenomenology.
In recent decades, critical and theoretical debate in the field of culture and literature has called into question many literary categories, has re-discussed the literary canon, and has totally renovated critical approaches in the wake of major changes in western society such as the irruption of new cultural identities, the disruption of the well-established Euro-centric conception, and the need to establish new world visions. D. H. Lawrence has been a focus for critical debate since his early publications in the first decades of the 20th century. The force of his thought, his courageous challenge against the most important values of western industrial society, his rejection of England and its bourgeois values, his choice to live in exile, his never-ending quest for lost vital meanings, his open-mindedness in coming into contact with different worlds and cultures, and the revolutionary impact of his writing have all provided critics with important issues for discussion. Most of Lawrence’s works are still being read and analysed through ever-new critical lenses and approaches. This volume brings together a selection of papers delivered at the 13th International D. H. Lawrence Conference, D. H. Lawrence: New Life, New Utterance, New Perspectives held in Gargnano in 2014, on Lake Garda: the place of Lawrence’s first Italian sojourn, where he started a “new life” with Frieda and a new phase as a writer. The essays selected for Part I of this volume offer new readings of Lawrence’s work and ideology through various theoretical and philosophical approaches, drawing comparisons with philosophers and thinkers such as Bataille, Darwin, Derrida, Heidegger, and Benjamin, among others. Part II focuses on translation, a concept which can be extended to cultural mediation, as it can be applied not only to the proper translation of texts from one language into another, but also to travel writing and to transcodification, as is the case of film versions of Lawrence’s novels.
Lawrence's work is placed in the context of developments in the tradition of Romantic poet-philosophers and visionary thinkers. Robert E. Montgomery shows how Lawrence reacted to the work of Nietzsche, Heraclitus and Jacob Boehme, where he found ideas similar to his own and precedents for his attempts to evolve a new mode of prophetic-poetical-philosophical discourse, and how Lawrence's place in the visionary tradition differs from that of contemporaries Eliot and Yeats. The result is an exploration of the complex vision that informs and unifies Lawrence's work.
While the dehumanizing effects of technology, modernity, and industrialization have been widely recognized in D. H. Lawrence's works, no book-length study has been dedicated to this topic. This collection of newly commissioned essays by a cast of international scholars fills a genuine void and investigates Lawrence's peculiar relationship with modern technology and modernity in its many and varied aspects. Addressing themes such as pastoral vs. industrial, mining, war, robots, ecocriticism, technologies of the self, film, poetic devices of technology, entertainment, and many others, these essays help to reevaluate Lawrence's complicated standing within the modernist literary tradition and reveal the true theoretical wealth of a writer whose whole life and work, according to T.S. Eliot, "was an assertion of what the modern world has lost."
