Abdulla Al-Dabbagh: D. H. Lawrence: A Study of Literary Fascism

This book, derived from a dissertation entitled ‘The Social and Political Ideas of D. H. Lawrence’, submitted to the University of Cambridge back in 1970, takes an orthodox Marxist approach to Lawrence’s political outlook in a selection of his fictional and non-fictional writings.
It is informed by the celebration of “critical realism” in nineteenth-century fiction, whose purpose was to alert readers to the contradictions implicit in the capitalist ideology, and so to “point the way to its inevitable collapse” (p. 63). Engels and Lenin are invoked in their call for a literature which exposes the self-sustaining ideology of the bourgeoisie. This approach is then used as a stick with which to beat D. H. Lawrence. He swiftly emerges as a reactionary writer whose work reproduces the contradictions of bourgeois individualism. Rather than presenting an objective analysis of it, his writings are said to conceal an anti-democratic politics in “a heavy dose of mystical psychology and extreme subjectivism” (p. 24). They are charged with unconsciously propagating bourgeois ideology, and with actively embracing fascism, imperialism, racism and sexism.