D. H. Lawrence left one of the most diverse collections of literary works ever contributed to the literature of the English language; the Lawrence canon contains a body of material which includes novels, short fiction, poetry, drama, literary criticism, travel essays, and philosophical writings. Since Lawrence is generally considered a novelist, the problem arises concerning the relationship between his novels and his other writings. In this case the concentration will be upon Lawrence's philosophical writings or what Lawrence called his pseudo-philosophy--his "pollyanalytics."

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, 1967. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 1998. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2842. Typescript. Abstract precedes thesis as preliminary leaves [1]-2. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-84).

Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love present sequentially in fictional version Lawrence's own personal journey into self-discovery in the form of a creation myth of sensual love which repeats the archetypal patterns of some of the great mythologies. It is the purpose of the following pages to show how these three novels reveal the major archetypal patterns of mythology as suggested by Joseph Campbell in his study, The Hero with A Thousand Faces.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität zu Köln, 1982. / Added thesis t.p. Includes bibliographical references (p. [i]-xxvi).

This dissertation rethinks textual images of the other’s beauty, depicted in works by D. H. Lawrence, Muriel Spark, and Virginia Woolf, whose fascination with the other, called by this dissertation the beloved, urged them to inscribe the beloved’s original beauty in texts. Their works make perceptible the singularity of the beloved, while revealing the writers’ predicament in translating the beloved’s ineffability in texts. Taking the untranslatability of the beloved into consideration, this dissertation traces the ways in which these writers’ texts capture the beloved’s original beauty at moments of revelation, related to epiphanies entering the terrain of literary modernism. My study thereby scrutinizes the dynamics of images of beauty and their impacts on art and politics in the context of modernism. In doing so, I argue that the texts I consider express the beloved’s singularity in challenge of the beautified images that many other artists invented for self-directed purposes in the early and mid-twentieth century. First, I explore Lawrence’s creation of aesthetic spaces in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) in keeping with his desire for making palpable visual spectacles through the text. Analyzing how this ambition helped to create the novel’s aesthetic scenes, I would like to define Lawrence as an aesthete whose aspiration lay in expressing the beauty of things. Then, I discuss Spark’s affection for her characters and her desire to visualize the figure’s originality in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and The Girls of Slender Means (1963). Considering Spark in relation to both modernists and Fascists, I propose that her making of the image of her character breaks away from Fascism’s aestheticization of human figures. Finally, I investigate Woolf’s love for words by focusing on “The Duchess and the Jeweller” (1938), a short story written for expressing various modes of beauty in words. Drawing to the represented link between words and smell, considered the most “wasteful” sense, I examine how the sensory medium makes perceptible intrinsic qualities of words, and argues that her depiction of words, linked to smell, reveals the anti-utilitarian nature of words, unconstrained by a craftsman’s manipulation of words.

Originally presented as the author's thesis, Rennes, 1966. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [191]-200).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1971. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

D. H. Lawrence made the final break through the mask of Victorian prudery to gain a full conception of man and his role in the universe. His principal emphasis is on the restoration of man's conception of himself as animal, an animal capable of conceptualizing, but essentially animal all the same. In attempting to restore man to the mindless state of irrational animism, Lawrence did away with the conventional idea of man as the perfection of God's created universe. Lawrence did not conceive of man as being controller of the natural universe; he thought of man as being, like Mellors in Lady Chatterly's Lover, a warden who lives within natural order. He attacks vain intellectual sophistry of the scientific, industrial society and finds man to be a brute spirit caged by the conventions of his puny reason and his self-imposed social customs. Philosophically, he changes the emphasis from being to becoming.

This dissertation examines D.H. Lawrence’s and Wyndham Lewis’s exploration of the evental subject, and asks how their work might help us understand agency in a way that does not discount powerful forms of socio-historical determinism. Examining a variety of their critical and fictional writing from the first three decades of the twentieth century, I argue that Lawrence and Lewis explore ways of thinking about the subject’s relationship to radical novelty without occluding the constraining forces of mass culture. Challenging conventional modernist forms of novelty which seek to except themselves from forces of historical and social determination, they pursue a form of novelty that emerges from these forces, yet radically reconfigures the world that history has produced. Similarly, even though the “evental subject” is conditioned by the forms of relation encoded by society, its agency lies in the power to transfigure the modes of being that have been normalized. The evental subject is not an autonomous source of agency that is exempted from the social order, but derives its agency from reconceptualizing the nature of social embeddedness—understanding social relations as unpredictably generative rather than narrowly limiting. In this regard, the forms of subjectivity articulated by Lawrence and Lewis substantially anticipate, and are illuminated by, Alain Badiou’s theory of the event. Chapter 1 argues that Lawrence’s Study of Thomas Hardy and Studies in Classic American Literature approach the problem of the evental subject largely in terms of affect, understanding the subject not as the preexistent and stable bearer of affective experience, but as the processual product of mutually-constituting affective relationships. Chapter 2 examines Women in Love to find Lawrence negotiating love as an affective site of radical subjective possibility that reconfigures the cultural norms through which intimate relationships are coded and constrained. Chapter 3 turns to Lewis’s The Enemy to ask how his version of the evental subject largely inhabits the tension between personality and selfhood, where the former suggests social performance and the latter denotes an autonomous, ontological category. Contra the conventional turn to the autonomous self as the source of agency, he seeks to understand the subject, and its agency, as the product of social performance. Finally, Chapter 4 argues that Tarr articulates the possibilities of a radically exteriorized understanding of personality; through Lewis’s ironic portrayal of the ineluctable ways in which even the perception of choice is coded by the situation, he presents fiction and authorship as the spaces in which to imagine an evental subject.