The rainbow david herbert lawrence6/20/2023 Lawrence never quite belonged among the modernists anyway. A critic as temperamentally unsympathetic to Lawrence as Irving Howe could write, with a revealing sense of priority, of “the revolutionary achievements of Lawrence, Joyce and, to a smaller extent, Woolf.” The list doesn’t usually come out that way today. More notoriously, he had also, in “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” opened up the English-language novel to a frank, four-letter-word treatment of sex. And, having found a way in “The Rainbow” and “Women in Love” to dramatize the lives of his characters at a level where aggression and desire face off in a kind of primitive incandescence, he was duly credited as a technical innovator. In the decades after the Second World War, Lawrence was regarded as a culture hero: an intellectual up from the working class, a prophet against mechanized existence, a champion of instinctual life. And the tides of his reception have likewise shifted between adulation and disdain. People talking about Lawrence sound like his own quarrelsome couples: they hate him, they say, or they love him, or both. Lawrence must count as one of the most harmonious writers of all time. If, as Oscar Wilde said, when critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself, then D.
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