D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity

Book excerpt: While the dehumanizing effects of technology, modernity, and industrialization have been widely recognized in D. H. Lawrence's works, no book-length study has been dedicated to this topic. This collection of newly commissioned essays by a cast of international scholars fills a genuine void and investigates Lawrence's peculiar relationship with modern technology and modernity in its many and varied aspects. Addressing themes such as pastoral vs. industrial, mining, war, robots, ecocriticism, technologies of the self, film, poetic devices of technology, entertainment, and many others, these essays help to reevaluate Lawrence's complicated standing within the modernist literary tradition and reveal the true theoretical wealth of a writer whose whole life and work, according to T.S. Eliot, "was an assertion of what the modern world has lost."