D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity

While the dehumanizing effects of technology, modernity, and industrialization have been widely recognized in D. H. Lawrence’s works, no book-length study has been dedicated to this topic. This collection of newly commissioned essays by a cast of international scholars fills a genuine void and investigates Lawrence’s peculiar relationship with modern technology and modernity in its many and varied aspects. Addressing themes such as pastoral vs. industrial, mining, war, robots, ecocriticism, technologies of the self, film, poetic devices of technology, entertainment, and many others, these essays help to reevaluate Lawrence’s complicated standing within the modernist literary tradition and reveal the true theoretical wealth of a writer whose whole life and work, according to T.S. Eliot, "was an assertion of what the modern world has lost."

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Foreword Michael Bell (University of Warwick, UK) Acknowledgments Abbreviations Chronology Introduction Indrek Männiste (University of Tartu, Estonia) 1. D. H. Lawrence’s Long Passage from a Rural to an Industrial World Nick Ceramella (University of Trento, Italy) 2. “Colliers is a discontented lot”: “The Miner at Home” in the Nation and the 1912 National Coal Strike Annalise Grice (Nottingham Trent University, UK) 3. D. H. Lawrence among the Early Modern Bohemians Katherine Toy Miller (Angelo State University, USA) 4. D. H. Lawrence and "The Machine Incarnate": Robots Among the "Nettles" Tina Ferris (Independent Writing and Editing Professional and D.H. Lawrence scholar, USA) 5. “Men No More Than the Subjective Material of the Machine”: D. H. Lawrence, Machinery and War-time Psychology Andrew Harrison (University of Nottingham, UK) 6. To Produce, or Not to Produce, That Is the Question: Technology, Democracy and War in Women in Love Gaku Iwai (Konan University, Japan) 7. Hierarchy, Beauty, and Freedom: D. H. Lawrence's Response to Techno-Industrial Modernity Colin D. Pearce (Clemson University, USA) 8. “The Art of Living”: D. H. Lawrence’s Technologies of Self Jeff Wallace (Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK)I 9. Engineering Away Humanity: Lawrence on Technology and Mental Consciousness in Lady Chatterley’s Loverand Pansies Andrew Keese (Texas Tech University, USA) 10. Lawrence’s Allotropic "Gladiatorial": Resisting the Mechanization of the Human in Women in Love Thalia Trigoni (University of Cambridge, UK) 11. Green Lawrence?: Consciousness, Ecology and Poetry Fiona Becket (University of Leeds, UK) 12. D. H. Lawrence and Film: Reconsidering Fidelity in Ken Russell's Women in Love Earl G. Ingersoll (College at Brockport, USA) 13. Poetics of Technology: D. H. Lawrence and the Well-Tempered Counterpoint Indrek Männiste (University of Tartu, Estonia) 14. Trains in D. H. Lawrence's Creative Writing Helen Baron (Independent Scholar and Editor, UK) 15. On Entertainment: The Lassitude of Lawrence's Dead Novel Dominic Jaeckle (Goldsmiths College, UK) Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Indrek Männiste is Researcher of Literature and Philosophy at the University of Tartu, Estonia, and author of Henry Miller: The Inhuman Artist: A Philosophical Inquiry (Bloomsbury, 2013).

Review :
A great addition to D.H. Lawrence’s scholarship. Over the last two centuries, technology and mechanization have overwhelmed human beings, changing our lives at an alarming rate. This very thoughtful collection of essays highlights powerfully how Lawrence’s message is a never-ending struggle to cope with innovation and preserve our humanity. D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity sees Lawrence, as we might expect, as an opponent of the technological age. The main focus though—which moves Lawrence to the centre of debates about modernism and the machine—is on the writing as a profoundly thoughtful exploration of the new world that was coming into being. Editor Indrek Männiste shows, in both the introduction and his own chapter, that Lawrence was particularly interested in the consequences for the body and mental life. The contributors pursue the volume’s themes excitingly and convincingly in chapters that range in focus from green cultural critique to Lawrence’s ‘robot poems’, from trains to the First World War. [T]he collection offers a new perspective on Lawrence’s complex relationship with different forms of technology, and represents a valuable starting point not only for students of modernism but also for Lawrence scholars who wish to delve further into this exciting topic.