'How would you start making a new country?': D. H. Lawrence's nation building pilgrimage

In this dissertation I analyze D. H. Lawrence's writings and paintings in order to show how they form a nation building vision that transcends genre. While critics have commented on limited aspects of Lawrence's ideas about difference and politics, there has not been a book-length study of his ideas on many of the other important principles underlying nation building. When coupled with his biographical commitment to nation building, such as his utopian vision Rananim and his "savage pilgrimage" around the world, Lawrence's numerous compositions across genre reveal his devotion to nation making.;Lawrence wrote about nation in the abstract in his non-fiction, and then went on a pilgrimage to record and influence the development of new nations, after which he produced a fictional book in which he worked out his abstract ideas. A quasi-imperial quest in which Lawrence would take the ideas of foreign nations and give back a book, and then return to England with those ideas synthesized during his encounters with foreign lands with the hope that he could rebuild England from those ideological resources, the "savage pilgrimage" was a unique effort by a writer to apply and synthesize his ideas to and from real life situations.;While the dissertation examines the historical context of Lawrence's ideas, it does a close reading of key metaphors and symbols that appear in his nation building works, such as those conveyed through his appropriations of the Noah story and use of the marriage metaphor, in order to reveal the political significance of his symbolic structure.;The implications of this study are significant because they offer a new and more in-depth perspective on one of Modernity's most vital writers, and because Lawrence's ambivalences about nation building speak to concerns we presently have about national identity, the international role of nations, and how political and cultural rhetoric influences the development of nations.