'Passionate struggle into conscious being': D.H. Lawrence and creative nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction is a fast emerging genre which was formally named in 1983, but has been practiced in the Western tradition since the times of the ancient Greeks who utilized the essay form for this purpose. This revival of belles-lettres points to a change in the academic climate, mainly in North America but increasingly around the world, whereby academics and critics are expanding the domain of literary study into the public sphere. In this new climate it is appropriate to re-visit the nonfictional works of Modernist British writer D. H. Lawrence, who is known for his anti-academic stance as much as for the striking quality of his language. Although Lawrence is known principally as a novelist and numerous studies have been conducted on his fiction, he is also the author of a large quantity of nonfiction which is only now becoming the focus of attention. This dissertation seeks to study some of Lawrence's nonfictional works in the light of debates surrounding the field of contemporary creative nonfiction in order to illuminate those debates and to discover standards for evaluating texts in this new field.