There is an interesting phrase in The Lost Girl, ‘the nostalgia of the heathen past’. Lawrence uses a similar one, ‘the nostalgia for the old pagan world’in his essay, Apocalypse. Both expressions evoke an important image, namely the image of a god who wears various reddish colours all about him and‘dips his lips in blood’of sacrifice. My purpose in this paper is to probe the image of such a fierce god and elucidate the meaning of the phrases.
I also analyse the image of‘the immense piles’of clouds glowing red which appears in Sons and Lovers, because it is closely associated with the image of a fierce god. This analysis makes it clear that the image of glowing clouds signifies Paul's release of passion.
My contention is that those images implying liberation of passion play a significant part throughout Lawrence's career and provide an important clue for understanding one of the chief characteristics of his novels.

View full abstract

In this paper, we aim to clarify the ambiguous relationship between the poet and the language. Many of his poems are written in the early twentieth century, when the concept of the language is drastically changed. In the first chapter, we pay attention to how this conceptual transition, namely, from‘word in the world’to‘world in the word’is reflected in his poetry. The‘world in the word’concept can be threatening for each of us, because we ourselves are to be captured and ruled by the language.
The following three chapters deal with the poet's rhetorical strategy to flee from this‘world in the word’concept. His strategy seems to lie in the backward movement toward our origin: from the meaning to the sound, from the language to the body, and from the present to the past or even to the moment before our birth.
In the fifth chapter, we see that Lawrence's strategy is changing. He, who has tried to seek for the freedom out of the language, now tries to seek for it rather within the language, which might be regarded as a post-modern approach to the language. And in the last chapter, we reconsider the connection between the poet and the post-modernism from the viewpoint of the language.

View full abstract

Clifford, appearing in this novel as a professional writer, can be regarded as an early personification of the transitional stage from industrial capitalism to consumer capitalism in the 1920's, because in a consumer capitalist society knowledge and information rather than material things become more and more important than in the prior stage of capitalism. After his literary success, his interest veers towards management of a coalmine. This conversion implies his transition from ambisextrous identity-writing books was then regarded as a feminine occupation-to masculine one of potency. It is, however, nothing other than a return to the feudal system of the past, and his noblesse oblige is at odds with entrepreneurial qualities in a consumer society. The apparent description of Clifford and Mellors as opposite characters embodying culture and nature respectively makes explicit the culture/nature dichotomy: the former heads for a more advanced industrial system, while the latter dreams about returning to some idyllic countryside in the past. This results from the fact that Lawrence, who inherited the nineteenth-century criticism of industrialism, could not have a schema which would have enabled him fully to interpret those incipient symptoms of the new social conditions emerging in the last phase of his career.

View full abstract