D.H. Lawrence's Response to Plato: A Bloomian Interpretation is a complex, unique, intellectually stimulating application of Harold Bloom's «anxiety of influence» theories to the art and thought of D.H. Lawrence. In this brilliant pioneering study Barry J. Scherr demonstrates Lawrence's great strength as a cultural figure ranking even with the classical Plato. Furthermore, Dr. Scherr's quintessentially original readings of Women in Love and Lady Chatterley's Lover provide remarkable insights and compelling analysis concerning these two Lawrence classics. Not only does this creative study present a radically new reading of Lawrence, but it also makes Bloom's theory come alive for us.
D. H. Lawrence Today is a rare and extraordinary blend of intellectual-political history, psycho-literary biography, and literary criticism not seen in Lawrence studies since the heyday of F. R. Leavis. Barry J. Scherr provides a vigorous defense of Lawrence against his powerful enemies in the literary-cultural-political-academic world - a world dominated today by the political correctness of the elite extreme left-wing intelligentsia. Dr. Scherr employs a daring, original, intense strategy to deal with Lawrence's enemies, involving unique, intricate, complex explication de texte as well as incisive polemic. Unconventional and seminal, D. H. Lawrence Today is the most stimulating, provocative, courageous book on Lawrence to appear in many years.
Focusing on D. H. Lawrence's concept of «essential criticism», which was introduced in his posthumously published «Study of Thomas Hardy» and his statement that «every work of art adheres to some system of morality. But it must contain the essential criticism on the morality to which it adheres», this book examines the ways in which Lawrence presents his ideas in his major novels The Rainbow and Women in Love. It explores how this concept plays a crucial role in his fiction as an «other» to the implied author's messages: functioning differently, as equivocation and creative strife, respectively, in The Rainbow and Women in Love, the concept helps to make these novels more dynamic that commonly realized.
This book is the first to examine the influence of Shakespeare—particularly Hamlet—on D. H. Lawrence. Using the Bloomian theory of the “anxiety of influence” to probe the startling depths of Lawrence’s agon with his towering precursor Shakespeare, it closely examines Lawrence’s crypto-Jewish identity, as well as that of many of his highly individual characters, who embody the characteristics of Old Testament figures, and in so doing infuse a patriarchal strength and divine “religious” sublimity into civilized life. Lawrence’s claims about the self-sacrificing influence of Christianity on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, on the other hand, demonstrate how this influence carries over into the submission of the subject and the decline of Western Civilization. The book extrapolates this decline into a critique of the modern-day left-wing ideology that appropriates the self-abnegating individual to its collectivist ends. In responding agonistically to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Lawrence claims a far more complete, vital, and salubrious “consciousness” and a Weltanschauung that makes for greater, more fulfilling “life” thanks to the inner strength, psychic and sexual power of the Lawrentian “Self Supreme.” The book will appeal to Lawrence and Shakespeare scholars and enthusiasts who wish to appreciate Lawrence and Shakespeare as supremely profound writers and thinkers. Its unique demonstration of Bloomian literary theory makes it come poignantly alive for both graduate students and college professors.
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."
Without question, modernist texts have been haunted by what can be known, or more aptly, what cannot be known. This position is foundational to one of the pivotal readings of modernism. Simultaneously, economic, legal, and political shifts that occurred during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced real material changes pertaining to the status of women. Thus, as many others have adeptly argued, modernism is also a crisis in gender. Modernism, Metaphysics, and Sexuality keenly suggests that these narratives - the thinking of what constitutes truth and the rethinking of gender - are intertwined. Interpreting Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Victory, Forster's A Passage to India and Maurice, Lawrence's Women in Love, and Woolf's A Room of One's Own and To the Lighthouse through Luce Irigaray's rereading of western metaphysics, Raschke suggests that where there is a crisis in knowing, there is also a crisis in gender.
British Modernism and the Anthropocene: Experiments with Time assesses the environmental politics of modernism in relation to the idea of the Anthropocene--a proposed geological epoch in which humans have fundamentally changed the Earth System. The early twentieth century was marked by environmental transformations that were so complex and happened on such great scales that they defied representation. Modernist novelists responded with a range of innovative narrative forms that started to make environmental crisis on a planetary scale visible. Paradoxically, however, it is their failures to represent such a crisis that achieve the greatest success. David Shackleton explores how British modernists employed types of narrative breakdown--including fragmentation and faltering passages devoid of events--to expose the limitations of human schemes of meaning, negotiate the relationship between different scales and types of time, produce knowledge of ecological risk, and register various forms of non-human agency. Situating modernism in the context of fossil fuel energy systems, plantation monocultures, climate change, and species extinctions, Shackleton traces how H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, Olive Moore, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Rhys undertook experiments with time in their novels that refigure history and the historical situations into which they were thrown. Ultimately, British Modernism and the Anthropocene shows how modernist novels provide rich resources for rethinking the current environmental crisis, and cultivating new structures of environmental care and concern.
