Reading D. H. Lawrence in the Anthropocene

Terry Gifford is Visiting Research Fellow at Bath Spa University’s Research Centre for Environmental Humanities and Profesor Honorifico at the University of Alicante, Spain. A co-founder of British ecocriticism, he is the author of D. H. Lawrence, Ecofeminism and Nature (2023), Pastoral (2020), Green Voices (2011), Reconnecting With John Muir: Essays in Post-Pastoral Practice (2006), The Joy of Climbing (2004) and Teaching A Level English Literature (with John Brown, 1989). He has also written or edited seven books on Ted Hughes, most recently Ted Hughes in Context (2018). His eighth collection of poetry is A Feast of Fools (2018). He is currently writing an ecofeminist reading of Lawrence’s short stories.

After years in the critical wilderness, D. H. Lawrence is ripe for a revival and this deserves to be the book where it begins. Once seen primarily as a harbinger of the sexual revolution, Lawrence was in more profound ways a prophet who foresaw the damage inherent in modernity's alienation from the natural world. These essays by a range of distinguished Lawrentian scholars reveal the prescience of his vision, as witnessed throughout his extraordinarily productive and varied writing career.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction: Reading Strategies for the AnthropoceneTerry GiffordPart I. Reading Lawrence’s Environmentalism1. Rehabilitating Lawrence for the AnthropoceneFiona Becket2. Lawrence’s Environmentalism: From ‘Pastoral’ to Anthropocene RebirthJeffrey Mathes McCarthy3. Against Rome and Modernity: ‘naturalness verging on the commonplace’ in Sketches of Etruscan PlacesNeil RobertsPart II. ‘Interrelatedness’ Redefines the Human4. ‘Its own weird anima’: Lawrence ‘Unpaints’ the HumanCarrie Rohman5. Lawrence’s Embodied Guide to Navigating the Anthropocene in Women in LoveMarie Bertrand6. Relationality in Lawrence’s Non-FictionTim GupwellPart III. ‘New connections’ with Animals and Other Beings7. Anthropocene Aesthetics in Lawrence’s Later FictionHarry Acton8. Carrying the Other in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’ and Last PoemsMaria Trejling9. Lawrence and Proto-VeganismCatherine BrownPart IV. ‘Interpenetration’ of the Vegetal10. Forests in Lawrence and Philippe DescolaFiona Fleming11. Lawrence and ScalePatrick Armstrong12. Lawrence’s Vegetal Poetics and the AnthropoceneChao XiePart V. ‘Re-establish the living organic connections with the cosmos’13. Complicity and CritiqueJeff Wallace14. Nature, Transformation and the Frankfurt School in Lawrence’s Late FictionHoward J. Booth15. Beginning at the End: Lawrence’s Apocalypse as Eco-RevelationAdrian TaitNotes on ContributorsIndex