Reading D. H. Lawrence in the Anthropocene - by Terry Gifford (Hardcover)

About the Book

Explores D. H. Lawrence's environmentalism and suggests new ways of reading his works in the Anthropocene.

Book Synopsis

How do the works of D. H. Lawrence speak to readers in the age of the Anthropocene? In this volume, sixteen scholars from six countries explore different answers to this question, considering Lawrence's novels, short fiction, poetry, paintings and his often-provocative polemical essays. This comprehensive survey of Lawrence's writings and artworks reveals that his familiar enquiries into human nature were always situated within the energies, large and local, of what he calls 'the cosmos' which is our shared home. Lawrence challenges his readers by his movements between cynicism and idealism, dissolution and creativity, critique and regeneration - the very tensions that confront us today in the face of industrial capitalism and environmental deterioration. This revelation of Lawrence's passionate 'environmentalism' not only fills what has been described as 'a gaping hole in Lawrence studies'. It also drills down into the heart of the problems holding back an adequate response to the climate crisis by offering fundamental values for recovery.

Review Quotes

After years in the critical wilderness, D. H. Lawrence is ripe for a revival and this deserves to be the book where it begins. Once seen primarily as a harbinger of the sexual revolution, Lawrence was in more profound ways a prophet who foresaw the damage inherent in modernity's alienation from the natural world. These essays by a range of distinguished Lawrentian scholars reveal the prescience of his vision, as witnessed throughout his extraordinarily productive and varied writing career.--Sir Jonathan Bate, Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities at Arizona State University and author of The Song of the Earth