Routledge D.H. Lawrence: The Utopian Vision

The dominant view of D.H. Lawrence's work has long been that of F. R. Leavis, who confined Lawrence within an exclusively ethical and artistic tradition. In D.H. Lawrence: The Utopian Vision, Eugene Goodheart widens the context in which Lawrence should be understood to include European as well as English writers - Blake, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud among others. Goodheart shows that the characteristic impulse of Lawrence's principal discovery was the bodily or physical life that he believed man had once possessed in his pre-civilized past and must now fully recover if future civilized life is possible. Goodheart's argument fully engages the paradoxes of Lawrence's writing. He is at once the last great representative of the moral tradition of the English novel and of the English Protestant imagination and a novelist without precedent, a diabolist in the service of the dark gods. He rejects the claims of society, while simultaneously lamenting the thwarting of the societal instinct. The oppositions and paradoxes in the work are the expression of a single, not always coherent, revolutionary imagination. D.H. Lawrence: The Utopian Vision provides a rigorous and critical analysis of the ideological character of Lawrence's novels and essays, in particular the effect of his utopianism on his views of nature, myth, and religious experience, while responding to his aesthetic achievement. Goodheart's Lawrence is a prophetic artist whose vision is at once inspiring and dangerous. In the new introduction to the book, Goodheart reflects upon the vicissitudes of Lawrence's reputation since the sixties when the book first appeared and his relevance to the concerns of our own time. Review -This book is a distinguished addition to the considerable body of critical works on Lawrence which continue to come from American university presses. Goodheart has seized on a really significant aspect of Lawrence's genius and has defined it with great acuteness and intelligence. His book is admirably written and refreshingly free ... [of] pedantic jargon.- --V. de S. Pinto, Notes and Queries -Mr. Goodheart's book states and develops a clear and discrete critical thesis about Lawrence--that an important and perhaps the most characteristic part of his thought expresses a radical antagonism to civilization and society. This was no doubt obvious enough thirty years ago, but F. R. Leavis's interpretation of Lawrence has led to his being read as a writer who was essentially 'social-minded' in the nineteenth-century mode. Now, as Lawrence comes more and more to figure as a 'classic' and as a subject of academic study, it is useful to have Mr. Goodheart's emphasis on that large part of his work which is farouche and uncompro-mising in its rejection of social life as the condition of personal salvation...Mr. Goodheart argues his case with an admirable economy and in a prose that is both felicitous and forceful.- --Lionel Trilling. -I have read this manuscript and have great admiration for it.- --Mark Schorer. -On the ideological side alone, Eugene Goodheart's contribution is an important one. In evoking Whitehead, Jaspers, Cassirer, and others he places Lawrence most significantly in the modern scene. On the literary side, Mr. Goodheart draws salient parallels between Lawrence's work and that of Faulkner, Rilke, Camus, and other notable modern authors. No previous commentator has ever done all this so thoroughly and so convincingly on the subject of Lawrence, which alone makes this book a highly impor-tant study of this author.- --Harry T. Moore "This book is a distinguished addition to the considerable body of critical works on Lawrence which continue to come from American university presses. Goodheart has seized on a really significant aspect of Lawrence's genius and has defined it with great acuteness and intelligence. His book is admirably written and refreshingly free ... [of] pedantic jargon." --V. de S. Pinto, Notes and