Lawrence David Herbert - Defiant Desire: Some Dialectical Legacies of D. H. Lawrence

Kingsley Widmer, one of the most insightful and provocative learned critics, has long had a considerable influence on D. H. Lawrence studies. Here he elaborates the crucial argument that the erotic conversion experience and its dialectic of social negation centrally define Lawrence, thus creating his major legacies.

In dialectically considering all of Lawrences novels and many of his essays and stories, Widmer carries the issues beyond the texts to Lawrences literary and ideological inheritors, including Henry Miller and Norman Mailer. In addition, he imbeds Lawrences fictions and roles in the dark prophecy of affirmatively countering the Nietzschean tradition and, in a striking chapter on Lady Chatterleys Lover explores the use of obscenity, sexual ideology, and anticlass utopianism. This is Lawrence as a major dissident culture hero with a still pertinent, drastic revisionism of human responses in a nihilistic world. It is a large and controversial critical view.

Kingsley Widmer has been a prolific writer of scholarly literary and cultural criticism and of poetry and libertarian essays. This is his tenth critical book.