River of Dissolution

First published in 1969. This title concerns itself with the ambivalence of Lawrences attitude towards corruption. Clarke demonstrates that Lawrences attitude to will and to sensational or disintegrative sex is much more equivocal than conceded. At the same time this is a study of Lawrences debt as a novelist to the English Romantic poets. A tradition of metaphor is traced from the second half of the eighteenth century, through the poetry of the major Romantics to the Decadents, and so to Lawrence, whose attitudes to mechanism and corruption are shown to be articulated, above all, through ambivalent images of dissolution and disintegration. This title will be of interest to students of literature.