The Glyph and the Gramophone D.H. Lawrence's Religion [Hardcover]

D. H. Lawrence wrote in 1914, ???Primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depths of my religious experience.' Although he had broken with the Congregationalist faith of his childhood by his early twenties, Lawrence remained throughout his writing life a passionately religious man. There have been studies in the last twenty years of certain aspects of Lawrence's religious writing, but we lack a survey of the history of his developing religious thought and of his expressions of that thought in his literary works. This book provides that survey, from 1915 to the end of Lawrence's life. Covering the war years, Lawrence's American works, his time in Australia and Mexico, and the works of the last years of his life, this book provides readers with a complete analysis, during this period, of Lawrence as a religious man, thinker and artist.

Luke Ferretter is Associate Professor of Twentieth-Century British and American Literature at Baylor University, USA. He is author ofSylvia Plath's Fiction: A Critical Study(2010),Louis Althusser(2006),Towards a Christian Literary Theory(2003), and has published widely on twentieth-century literature, theory and religion.

Introduction: Lawrence and the Study of Religion \ 1. The Struggle with Congregationalism: The Early Years \ 2. Re-Writing the Bible: The Rainbow \ 3. The Metaphysics of Blood: Women in Love and the War Years \ 4. The Cultured Animist: Native American Religion \ 5. The Dark God: Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent \ 6. Throwing Back the Apple: The Return to Eden \ Bibliography \ Index.

???Ferretter (British and American literature, Baylor Univ.) argues that Lawrence replaced organized religion with the idea, taken from Herbert Spencer, of an unknown God. Ferretter explains the problem using terms from Lawrence: what he desires is the glyph (the excess of signification); what he has is the gramophone (the empty signification of modernity). He lC˜