D. H. Lawrence : Aesthetics and Ideology

The vast body of Lawrence scholarship has veered between the extremes of uncritical celebration and violent denigration. This first extended study of Lawrence's aesthetics draws on a number of modern critical approaches to present an original and balanced analysis of Lawrence's literary and art criticism, and of the complex cultural context from which it emerged. Emphasising the influence on this most`English' of writers of a German intellectual and cultural heritage, Anne Fernihough focuses on Lawrence's connections with the völkisch ideologies prevalent in Germany from 1910-1930, from which both Heideggerian philosophy and Nazism emerged. The deep-seated affinities between Lawrentian and Heideggerian aesthetics are examined for the first time, and the author highlights Lawrence's `green' critique of industrialization. New light is shed on Lawrence's hostility towards Freud, contrasting the two writers' thinking on art and the unconscious. The book's reassessment of Lawrence's relationship with Bloomsbury opposes the received view that Lawrence and the Bloomsbury art critics were poles apart. This fascinating and lucid study reveals Lawrence's art criticism as pluralistic and anti-authoritarian, a necessary antidote to his sometimes brutally authoritarian politics and to the dogma and rigidity that pervades so many other areas of Lawrence's thought.