D. H. Lawrence, Transport and Cultural Transition

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

   PDF

2. Introduction: ‘Great Motions Carry Us’: Lawrence, Transport and Shifting Cultures

   • Andrew F. Humphries

   Pages 1-33

3. ‘Love Should Give a Sense of Freedom, Not of Prison’: Transport, Male Mobility and Female Space in Sons and Lovers

   • Andrew F. Humphries

   Pages 35-77

4. ‘She was a Traveller on the Face of the Earth’: Transport as Female Dissent in The Rainbow

   • Andrew F. Humphries

   Pages 79-122

5. ‘Yet Underneath was Death Itself’: Transports and Subtexts of War in Women in Love

   • Andrew F. Humphries

   Pages 123-177

6. ‘To Turn One’s Back on the Cog-Wheel World’: Transport, Otherness and Revolution in The Plumed Serpent

   • Andrew F. Humphries

   Pages 179-223

7. ‘A Vast and Ghastly Intricacy of Mechanism’: Automobility, Disability and the Motor Car in Lady Chatterley’s Lover

   • Andrew F. Humphries

   Pages 225-268

8. Conclusion: ‘Fascinating are the Scenes of Departures’: Etruscan Ships of Death and Lawrencian Endings

   • Andrew F. Humphries

   Pages 269-275

9. Back Matter

   Pages 277-297

   PDF

This book discusses D. H. Lawrence’s interest in, and engagement with, transport as a literal and metaphorical focal point for his ontological concerns. Focusing on five key novels, this book explores issues of mobility, modernity and gender. First exploring how mechanized transportation reflects industry and patriarchy in Sons and Lovers, the book then considers issues of female mobility in The Rainbow, the signifying of war transport in Women in Love, revolution and the meeting of primitive and modern in The Plumed Serpent, and the reflection of dystopian post-war concerns in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Appealing to Lawrence, modernist, and mobilities researchers, this book is also of interest to readers interested in early twentieth century society, the First World War and transport history.

• Technology
• Modernism
• First World War
• Suffrage
• Industry
• British and Irish Literature

“IN THIS EXCELLENT, INNOVATIVE STUDY, Andrew F. Humphries has written an integrated cultural, theoretical, and close-textual reading of five major novels of D. H. Lawrence … . I wholeheartedly and enthusiastically recommend this innovative, persuasively revisionist discussion of Lawrence’s major novels. Each chapter offers surprising and convincing readings of the fiction. I suspect that D. H. Lawrence and Transport will be a standard scholarly work for years to come.” (Peter Balbert, English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, Vol. 62 (1), 2019)


“Andrew Humphries’s timely monograph offers an in-depth exploration of D. H. Lawrence’s fascination with technologies of transport, and of the multiple ways in which this fascination informs his major novels. … Humphries’s study will thus be welcomed by students and scholars of modernist literature, as well as by those interested in the intersection of technologies of transport with the literature and culture … Humphries consistently and skilfully blends close textual analysis with rich contextual detail … .” (Emma Short, The Journal of Transport History, Vol. 39 (1), 2018)

• Faculty of Education, Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury, United Kingdom

  Andrew F. Humphries

Andrew F. Humphries is Senior Lecturer in English Education at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK, specialising in twentieth-century literature and modernism. He has also taught on courses in British Drama, Victorian Literature and on the theme of Childhood and Children in Literature. He is co-editor with Adrienne E. Gavin of two books: the international award-winning Childhood in Edwardian Fiction: Worlds Enough and Time and Transport in British Fiction: Technologies of Movement 1840-1940.

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