モダニズム文学としての『海とサルデーニャ』

抄録

This paper is an attempt to identify the narrative structure of D.H. Lawrence's Sea and Sardinia and place the work in the context of the Lawrence oeuvre and also that of Modernist literature.
The narrative of Sea and Sardinia is characterized by its rapid shifts of tone and its fragmentariness, the most speedy and least unified of Lawrence's prose works. This feature enables the vivid representation of the multilayered realities of travelling.
In its speedy, fragmented representation through a person on the move, Lawrence's Sea and Sardinia shares a common structure with some representative works of Modernism: particularly with James Joyce's Ulysses. Lawrence is, more often than not, considered as opposed to the mainstream of Modernism, and the narrative of Sea and Sardinia is the closest he ever came to that of Modernism. Interestingly, he was closest to the modernistic style, when he wrote a work of a minor genre (a travel book) most extemporaneously (the book was written with amazing speed, over 200 pages in six weeks). It was probably because he was unconsciously freer while writing at his most spontaneous, and because travel was an important literary feature of the time.