Against skeptics, Männiste argues that Miller does indeed have a philosophy of his own, which underpins most of his texts. It is demonstrated that this philosophy, as a metaphysical sense of life, forms a system the understanding of which is necessary to adequately explain even some of the most basic of Miller's ideas. Building upon his notion of the inhuman artist, Miller's philosophical foundation is revealed through his literary attacks against the metaphysical design of the modern age. It is argued that, by repudiating some of the most potent elements of late modernity such as history, modern technology and an aesthetisized view of art, Miller paves the way for overcoming Western metaphysics. Finally it is showed that, philosophically, this aim is governed by Miller's idiosyncratic concept of art, in which one is led towards self-liberation through transcending the modern society and its dehumanizing pursuits.

Scholarly responses to Henry Miller's works have never been numerous and for many years Miller was not a fashionable writer for literary studies. In fact, there exist only three collections of essays concerning Henry Miller's oeuvre. Since these books appeared, a new generation of international Miller scholars has emerged, one that is re-energizing critical readings of this important American Modernist. Henry Miller: New Perspectives presents new essays on carefully chosen themes within Miller and his intellectual heritage to form the most authoritative collection ever published on this author.

Henry Miller and Modernism: The Years in Paris, 1930–1939 represents a major reevaluation of Henry Miller, focusing on the Paris texts from 1930 to 1939. Finn Jensen analyzes Miller in the light of European modernism, in particular considering the many impulses Miller received in Paris. Jensen draws on theories of urban modernity to connect Miller’s narratives of a male protagonist alone in a modern metropolis with his time in Paris where he experienced a self-discovery as a writer. The book highlights several sources of inspiration for Miller including Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Hamsun, Strindberg and the American Transcendentalists. Jensen considers the key movements of modernity and analyzes their importance for Miller, studying Eschatology, the Avant-Garde, Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, and Anarchism.

While the dehumanizing effects of technology, modernity, and industrialization have been widely recognized in D. H. Lawrence's works, no book-length study has been dedicated to this topic. This collection of newly commissioned essays by a cast of international scholars fills a genuine void and investigates Lawrence's peculiar relationship with modern technology and modernity in its many and varied aspects. Addressing themes such as pastoral vs. industrial, mining, war, robots, ecocriticism, technologies of the self, film, poetic devices of technology, entertainment, and many others, these essays help to reevaluate Lawrence's complicated standing within the modernist literary tradition and reveal the true theoretical wealth of a writer whose whole life and work, according to T.S. Eliot, "was an assertion of what the modern world has lost."

This study argues that this previously banned author devoted his entire life to articulating a religion of self-liberation in his autobiographical books, examining his life and work within the context of fringe religious movements that were linked with the avant-garde in New York City and Paris at the first of the 20th century. This study shows how these transatlantic movements – including Gurdjieff, Rosicrucianism, and Theosophy – gave him the hermeneutical devices, not to mention the creative license, to interpret texts and symbols from mainline religions in an iconoclastic manner, ranging from obscure Taoist treatises to the mystical works of Jacob Boehme. The influence of numerous philosophical sources widely circulated in his most critical years – particularly Henri Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) – also helped him develop a religious view situated between transcendence and immanence, in which self-liberation through the channeled flow of élan vital is the chief objective. Miller’s knowledge of these intellectual currents, along with his involvement with sidestream religious groups, inspired him to meld his religious and literary aims into one perplexing project.

In recent decades, critical and theoretical debate in the field of culture and literature has called into question many literary categories, has re-discussed the literary canon, and has totally renovated critical approaches in the wake of major changes in western society such as the irruption of new cultural identities, the disruption of the well-established Euro-centric conception, and the need to establish new world visions. D. H. Lawrence has been a focus for critical debate since his early publications in the first decades of the 20th century. The force of his thought, his courageous challenge against the most important values of western industrial society, his rejection of England and its bourgeois values, his choice to live in exile, his never-ending quest for lost vital meanings, his open-mindedness in coming into contact with different worlds and cultures, and the revolutionary impact of his writing have all provided critics with important issues for discussion. Most of Lawrence’s works are still being read and analysed through ever-new critical lenses and approaches. This volume brings together a selection of papers delivered at the 13th International D. H. Lawrence Conference, D. H. Lawrence: New Life, New Utterance, New Perspectives held in Gargnano in 2014, on Lake Garda: the place of Lawrence’s first Italian sojourn, where he started a “new life” with Frieda and a new phase as a writer. The essays selected for Part I of this volume offer new readings of Lawrence’s work and ideology through various theoretical and philosophical approaches, drawing comparisons with philosophers and thinkers such as Bataille, Darwin, Derrida, Heidegger, and Benjamin, among others. Part II focuses on translation, a concept which can be extended to cultural mediation, as it can be applied not only to the proper translation of texts from one language into another, but also to travel writing and to transcodification, as is the case of film versions of Lawrence’s novels.