Acton, Harry (2025) The embodied reader in D. H. Lawrence's criticism and fiction: reading, feeling and modernist form. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 9781399538251.
Abstract
This book puts D. H. Lawrence’s criticism and fiction in dialogue with a recent, multifaceted turn in literary studies towards readers’ affective and embodied responses to texts. It argues that Lawrence’s critical writing registers, in its turbulent forms as well as its explicit statements, the felt dimension of literary response, and explores how his affectively charged critical practice is rooted in a distinct early-twentieth-century culture of autodidactic reading. Rather than view Lawrence's major critical works as expressing a supposed authorial 'philosophy' or 'metaphysic' of embodiment, the book explores these texts’ volatile, culturally situated responses to the ways in which their subject texts themselves represent and evoke embodied life. The book analyses Lawrence's readings of Thomas Hardy's novels and nineteenth-century American literature in the light of 'postcritical', ethical and broadly materialist approaches to the text-reader relation, showing how his critical discourse of embodied response raises new questions for these perspectives, especially regarding the relation between readers’ felt responses and the sociocultural contexts of reading. The book demonstrates, further, how attending to Lawrence's critical aesthetics in these texts sheds new light on the means by which his own modernist fiction elicits embodied responses in the reader, and the ethical potential of such effects.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Book |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | D. H. Lawrence, embodiment, affect, reading, modernism, autodidacticism, Thomas Hardy, American literature, postcritique, narrative ethics |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication |
| Depositing User: | Harry Acton |
| Date Deposited: | 14 May 2025 15:28 |
| Last Modified: | 14 May 2025 15:28 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/55596 |
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