The Embodied Reader in D. H. Lawrence’s Criticism and Fiction: Reading, Feeling and Modernist Form

This book offers a new reading of D.H. Lawrence’s critical and fictional modernism, setting it in dialogue with a recent, multifaceted turn in literary studies towards readers’ affective and embodied responses to texts. It argues that Lawrence’s critical works acknowledge, in their turbulent forms as well as their explicit statements, reading as an embodied experience, and explores how his affectively charged critical practice is rooted in a distinct early-twentieth-century culture of autodidactic reading. Attending to Lawrence’s critical aesthetics of embodied reading, the book further demonstrates, sheds new light on the means by which his own modernist fiction engages felt responses in the reader, and on the ethical potential of such effects.