Fiona Becket
University of Leeds, UK
D H Lawrence and Ecological Selfhood
This paper extends debates on nature in Lawrence in the direction of green thinking and attempts to examine the validity of the notion of ecological selfhood in relation to selected poetry, fiction and discursive writing. Part of a longer project, this paper nevertheless aspires to present here a coherent sense of the place of Lawrence within green cultural critique, and to reread some of his works in the light of contemporary literary environmentalism. In doing so it also hopes to place some notions that have developed beyond modernist literary studies under a form of positive pressure, properly to assess their usefulness in approaching a canonical writer who is not infrequently invoked in debates about human/nature relations. In part this is an extension of debates about Lawrence's anti-Cartesian 'metaphysic'; it also, more specifically, throws into relief ethical questions about how the human subject stands in relation to non-human 'world'. It is one way of re-thinking certain recurrent dichotomies that surface repeatedly in Lawrence studies, but it is hoped that this framework of green cultural critique also enables a fresh approach to the writer and the work.