The Embodied Reader in D. H. Lawrence's Criticism and Fiction - by Harry Acton (Hardcover)

About the Book

Offers a new reading of D. H. Lawrence's critical and fictional modernism.

Book Synopsis

This book offers a new reading of D.H. Lawrence's critical and fictional modernism, setting it in dialogue with a recent, multifaceted turn in literary studies towards readers' affective and embodied responses to texts. It argues that Lawrence's critical works acknowledge, in their turbulent forms as well as their explicit statements, reading as an embodied experience, and explores how his affectively charged critical practice is rooted in a distinct early-twentieth-century culture of autodidactic reading. Attending to Lawrence's critical aesthetics of embodied reading, the book further demonstrates, sheds new light on the means by which his own modernist fiction engages felt responses in the reader, and on the ethical potential of such effects.

Review Quotes

In the Introduction to this engaging, well-researched and well-written book, Acton insists that we concentrate on D. H. Lawrence as an autodidact and a reader committed to finding effective critical expression for an openness to embodied feeling that characterises his modernist narratives. There is much to be excited about in this book. Often some of the most refreshing aspects of the argument are provided when the focus is on strategies in Lawrence's fiction that fail, or that push positively against inherited limits, stimulating Acton's discussion of a Levinasian dimension to new forms of embodied feeling emerging from social displacement and oppression, not least in The Rainbow inflected, as Acton argues, by the kind of reader of Thomas Hardy that Lawrence became. Also striking is how Acton repositions Lawrence's essay 'Studies in Classic American Literature' as a key text in approaching the complex and unstable relation between human and nonhuman bodies in his work, something that Lawrence found first in his reading of representations of nature in American literature. The book's Coda gives a cogent account of Lawrence's essays on the novel form to argue for Lawrence's emphasis on the entanglements of the reading self with other beings, something that the volume maintains from the outset without falling into the pitfalls of over-simplification, generalisation or untested speculation. The Embodied Reader in D.H. Lawrence's Criticism and Fiction: Reading, Feeling and Modernist Form is an important contribution to debates on Lawrence, modernism and radical materialist aesthetics.--Fiona Becket, University of Leeds