Reading feeling: the embodied reader in D.H. Lawrence’s criticism and fiction

Acton, Harry (2022) Reading feeling: the embodied reader in D.H. Lawrence’s criticism and fiction. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This thesis explores the central place of the embodied reader in Lawrence’s critical writings and his fiction. Rather than view Lawrence’s oeuvre as governed by an underlying vision or philosophy of embodied life, it traces his consistent critical concern with felt readerly response, and the practice of embodied reading evident in the turbulent discursive textures of his major critical works, ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ (1914) and Studies in Classic American Literature (1918-1923). In doing so, the thesis puts Lawrence’s critical writing in dialogue with recent ‘postcritical’, ethical and materialist theoretical perspectives on readerly experience. However, in linking Lawrence’s orientation towards literature’s felt effects with his specific cultural formation as an autodidact reader, the thesis also argues that his criticism offers new insights into the potential significance and value of embodied readerly responses. This investigation, in turn, opens new perspectives on ways in which the fiction Lawrence wrote alongside his critical works engages embodied feeling. Exploring the situated readerly responses mediated by Lawrence’s criticism thus both uncovers a new genealogy for his modernist practice more widely, and helps to reveal a consistent ethical impulse at work in his own narrative evocations of embodied experience.

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