Book Description

Desire for Love: The Secret Longings of the Human Heart in D. H. Lawrence’s Works is a collection of essays dedicated to several novels, novellas, short stories and non-fiction by D. H. Lawrence, one of the great 20th-century English writers. With the help of the psychoanalytic-textual approach, Marina Ragachewskaya analyses subtle expressions of the emotional sphere in Lawrence’s characters and their desire for love, which is realised linguistically, stylistically and symbolically. The discussion of the writer’s textual subtleties suggests emotional education and intellectual delight. The book offers an outline of Lawrence’s own psychoanalytic theory and how it is implemented in his fiction. Specific issues – such as love discourse, the unnamed eros, a Jungian quest in search of love, Doppelgängers, love of power and the power of love, sublimation and the language of dance, as well as love in the time of war – pertain to the discovery of unconscious desires and a “culture of feeling” in Lawrence. Comparisons with other authors are surprisingly rare in Lawrence studies. To fill this gap, the volume also contains an essay on Lawrence’s war stories analysed alongside Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Pat Barker’s Regeneration. This inquiry into genuine human feeling will be equally attractive to literature scholars, students and general readers.