The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts

This book includes twenty-eight chapters by specialists from across the arts, reassessing Lawrence’s relationship to aesthetic categories and specific art forms in their historical and critical contexts. A new picture of Lawrence as a multi-disciplinary artist emerges, expanding from traditional areas of enquiry in prose and poetry into the fields of drama, painting, music, dance, sculpture, architecture, historiography, life writing and queer and Biblical aesthetics. The Companion explores topics such as Lawrence’s politics in his art, his representations of technology, his practice of revising and rewriting, his manifold modes of performance, and the relationship between his criticism and creation of prose, poetry and painting. Investigation of Lawrence’s engagements with the work and themes of his fellow modernists represents him as more ‘modernist’ and less anti-aesthetic than has hitherto been the case; and his attitudes towards the working-classes, and anticipation of the ideas of the Frankfurt School, modern ecocriticism and queer theory, are presented as revealing him to be more progressive than has previously been recognised. This interdisciplinary Companion also makes a strong case for Lawrence’s continuing aesthetic power, as represented by case studies of his afterlives in biofiction, cinema, musical settings and portraiture.