This monograph proposes that the queerness of D.H. Lawrence’s early work should be understood through his admiration of French nineteenth-century writing. The ambivalence with which Lawrence wrote about sex and desire has received much critical attention: D.H. Lawrence and Nineteenth-Century French Literature makes the case for reading these themes through a lens which is both queer and Francophone. I argue that the subversive desires in Lawrence’s œuvre – those coloured by violence, discomfort, and death – can be traced through the work of nineteenth-century French literature, and posit a hitherto overlooked kinship between Lawrence and these writers. It draws connections between Lawrence’s work up to 1920 and seminal French writers Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, and Émile Zola, to show how Lawrence’s writing about queer desire not only owes a debt to the French literary canon, but that he might also be said to continue its legacy.
Price: $130.00
Pages: 304
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Publication Date:
19 April 2027
ISBN: 9781526180636
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
FICTION / World Literature / France / 19th Century, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, LITERARY CRITICISM / Comparative Literature, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / French, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literature: history and criticism, Literary theory
Jo Jones is a Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Manchester
Introduction ‘If English people don’t like what I write, and I think it’s probable they won’t, I shall settle in France and write for the French’
1 Queer modernism, queer modernity: Lawrence in context in the nineteenth-century French literary tradition
2 ‘He is too beautiful for a woman’: Balzac and Gautier’s dandies and male femininity in The White Peacock
3 ‘But why isn’t the end of the world as good as the beginning?’: Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal in Lawrence’s wartime writing
4 ‘Leap into the stars from the springboard of exact observation’: Science, myth, and knowledge between Zola and Lawrence
5 French directors adapting Lady Chatterley’s Lover: a queer legacy continued
