D. H. Lawrence and Pre-Einsteinian Modernist Relativity
On the 15th of June 1921, during his stay in Baden-Baden, Germany, British novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) encountered the German physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955). Lawrence read an English translation of Relativity: The Special and General Theory, which had been published in the previous year. The very next day he wrote: “Einstein isn’t so metaphysically marvellous, but I like him for taking out the pin which fixed down our fluttering little physical universe” (4L 37). Lawrence’s first response to Einstein is ambivalent, for his reading of works by Victorian relativists such as Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, William James, Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel had helped him foster his own concept of relativity, while his representations of relativity had interacted with modern artists including Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp and Umberto Boccioni. This book shows Lawrence’s exploration of relativity in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European cultural climate of Modernism and examines his representation of relativity in Women in Love (1920), The Lost Girl (1920), Aaron’s Rod (1922) and The Fox (original version, 1920; revised version, 1922).
Kumiko Hoshi is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Cultures at Aichi Gakuin University, Japan. She received her PhD from Tokyo Woman’s Christian University in 2009. Her main academic interests are the genre-crossing attempts of the modernist movement, with a special focus on D. H. Lawrence. She has published numerous essays on this topic, including “Modernism’s Fourth Dimension in Aaron’s Rod: Einstein, Picasso, and Lawrence” in Windows to the Sun: D. H. Lawrence’s “Thought-Adventures” (2009) and “D. H. Lawrence and Hannah Höch: Representation of the Post-World War I World” in Études lawrenciennes 46 (2015).
"I am familiar with Dr. Hoshi’s research in Modernist Literature, with a particular focus on D.H. Lawrence. I have read a number of her papers on the subject, as well as had many discussions with her directly. Her breadth of knowledge in the general area is excellent, with a correspondingly formidable depth of understanding, and she has the ability to analyze texts at the highest level."
Dr. Barnaby Ralph Associate Professor, Department of English and American Literature, Seikei University
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