D.H. Lawrence’s St. Mawr: An Ecocritical Study

Abstract

This study is an attempt to give a close ecocritic scrutiny to Lawrence’s St. Mawr. It unravels the dreary repercussions endowed by the environmental crisis, which haunted the imagination of literary artists. It was then that an interdisciplinary school emerged, named ecocriticism, to survey the impact of Industrialism on  imagination; the abuses of nature under the wing of Judeo-Christian religions; the impact of philosophy on nature; the secular apocalyptic outcome of mistreating nature; the man-women relationship, affected by environmental suppression; the description of nature in literature; the parallel situations of oppressed women and oppressed nature, as ecofeminism; and the way, in which, the misuses of the literary genre of pastoral have resulted in ecocritics new definition of it, as post-pastoral. Indeed, it brings to light the tragic attitude of man toward nature, which has lessened his gentleness and mental delicacy and made him a furious and revengeful social animal.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17576/3L-2014-2002-03

Keywords: anthropocentrism; biocentrism; blood-intimacy; ecocriticism; ecofeminism