D. H. Lawrence and Ambivalence in the Age of Modernity
Product details
- ISBN 9781032675688
- Weight: 430g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 26 Oct 2025
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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D. H. Lawrence is renowned for his scathing criticism of the ruling class, industrialisation of the country and wartime patriotism. However, his texts bear the imprint of contemporary dominant ideologies and discourses of the period. Comparing Lawrence’s texts to various major and minor contemporary novels, journal articles, political pamphlets and history books, this book aims to demonstrate that Lawrence’s texts are ambivalent: his texts harbour the dynamism of conflicting power struggles between the subversive and the reactionary. For example, in some apparently apolitical texts such as The White Peacock and Movements in European History, reactionary ideologies and wartime propaganda are embedded. Some texts like Lady Chatterley’s Lover are intended to be a radical critique of the period wherein it was composed, but they also bear discernible traces of the contemporary frame of reference that they intend to subvert. Focusing on Lawrence’s stories and novels set in the mining countryside and the works composed under the impact of the First World War, this book establishes that Lawrence’s texts in fact consist of multiple layers that are often in conflict with each other, serving as a testimony to the age of modernity.
Gaku Iwai is Professor of English at Konan University in Kobe, Japan. He is a co-editor and co-translator of the Japanese version of the Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, and the former chief editor of Japan D. H. Lawrence Studies. He has published numerous articles on D. H. Lawrence, J. M. Barrie, J. G. Ballard and Margaret Atwood, among others. He is also a co-author of several books on Lawrence and twentieth-century British writers, including D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).
