Upending the Telescope: D.H. Lawrence as Ecocritic and Birdwatcher
Though he may have been wary of -ism labels, in this paper I would like to assess to what extent Lawrence qualifies as an ecocritic and how his activity as a literary critic affected his own writing. Indeed, his critical output reveals that his primary concern was the quality of pulsing life immanen...
Gorde:
| Argitaratua izan da: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/lawrence, |
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| Egile nagusia: | |
| Formatua: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Hizkuntza: | Anglais |
| Argitaratua: |
Études Lawrenciennes
2021
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| Gaiak: | |
| Sarrera elektronikoa: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Gaia: | Though he may have been wary of -ism labels, in this paper I would like to assess to what extent Lawrence qualifies as an ecocritic and how his activity as a literary critic affected his own writing. Indeed, his critical output reveals that his primary concern was the quality of pulsing life immanent in a work, what he called the moral vision in a novel, rather than aesthetics. I will focus, though not exclusively, on Studies in Classic American Literature which he revised between 1919 and 1922 while writing the novel Kangaroo and the poem “The Humming-bird” included in Birds, Beast and Flowers. Echoing his assessment of Americans’ connections with their environment as depicted in classical works, Lawrence remarked about Australia in a letter to Baroness Anna von Richthofen “but the land has a ‘fourth dimension,’ and the white people swim like shadows over the surface of it” (Letters IV 238). In the novel Kangaroo, an epiphany in the Australian bush enables Lawrence’s alter-ego, Somers, to discard his ethnocentric views, the so-called “Babel” inherited from the country’s colonial past. By studying Lawrence’s keen observations of birds in particular, I hope to show how ecological awareness brings about a shift in language so that the “Babel” may be transcended in order to achieve “something beyond,” i.e., a cosmic ideal. |
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