River of Dissolution: D. H. Lawrence and English Romanticism

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Routledge, Mar 31, 2016 - Literary Criticism - 178 pages

First published in 1969. This title concerns itself with the ambivalence of Lawrence’s attitude towards corruption. Clarke demonstrates that Lawrence’s attitude to ‘will’ and to sensational or disintegrative sex is much more equivocal than conceded. At the same time this is a study of Lawrence’s debt as a novelist to the English Romantic poets. A tradition of metaphor is traced from the second half of the eighteenth century, through the poetry of the major Romantics to the Decadents, and so to Lawrence, whose attitudes to mechanism and corruption are shown to be articulated, above all, through ambivalent images of dissolution and disintegration. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

 

Contents

Introduction
Dissolve and quite forge A Tradition of Metaphor I Selfdestroying
Images of dissolution in Burkes Enquiry
Abstraction and decay
Living disintegration
Intensificationinreduction
Dissolves diffuses dissipates
Flux and irony
The Activity of Departure
Reductive Energy in The Rainbow
The Rhetoric of Corruption
Individuality and Belonging
Savage Visionaries
The Plumed Serpent and Lady Chatterleys Lover
Conclusion
Notes

The downward rhythm

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