D. H. Lawrence and the Bible

The Bible, as this book demonstrates, plays a key role in nearly all D. H. Lawrence’s work. It supplies not only the inspiration but on occasion the target for his parody. Wright establishes that Lawrence was familiar with the modernist critique of the Bible by higher critics and by anthropologists of religion. He also argues, however, that Lawrence’s playful reworking of the Bible, like that of Nietzsche, anticipates postmodernism. After considering the extraordinary range of Lawrence’s reading and the intertexts between the Bible and his own writing, Wright engages in a theoretically informed but clear exploration of the textual dynamics of Lawrence’s writing. His writing is seen to reveal a prolonged struggle to read the Bible in a much broader spirit than that encouraged by orthodox Christianity. Wright’s study sheds light not only on Lawrence’s work but on the Bible and on the creative process itself.