Book Description

The significance of D. H. Lawrence’s reading of two Italian Futurist volumes in the summer of 1914 is widely acknowledged, but the nature of its significance has not been more closely examined, nor traced through his major fictional and discursive writings of the Great War and its aftermath. D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism addresses the oversight, firstly by examining the context to Lawrence’s now famous June 1914 letters concerning Futurism; secondly, by placing Futurism – and Lawrence’s interest in Futurism – in the light of the movement’s intellectual indebtedness to nineteenth-century Naturalism; and, thirdly, by providing new readings of The Rainbow, Women in Love and Studies in Classic American Literature which draw on these contextual materials. The book’s form will make it attractive to scholars and students of European modernism as well as to those interested in the works of D. H. Lawrence.