The question of gender roles has intrigued novelists for ages. The general drama of the universe revolves around the battle of sexes for determining gender roles and dominance of power. Not many novelists of the twentieth century dared to voice so passionately, the problems of relationship between the sexes in a changing world that saw urbanization, industrialization and the World War eroding the age-old foundation of the society, as D.H. Lawrence did. The new age demanded a revision and reconstruction of gender roles, and Lawrence, the first English working-class novelist, boldly disrupted the rigid boundary of the beings. He navigated his way from self-observed chronicles of his adolescence to the sophisticated assessor of women and understood the importance of their role in the regeneration of man. Lawrence often quarreled and contradicted himself before proposing a prophetic ideal man-woman relationship for the society. That is why, he is hailed as a priest of love and a prophet against mechanized existence. His purpose was so big that his novels still make such nerve-racking readings and have not escaped the critical gaze of many. This book attempts to explore the causes of failure of relationship between man and woman in the modern age through the study of some of his best novels . It investigates the new kind of relationship based on gender balance, proposed by him, that believes in the necessity to revive the vitality in sexuality to reform the human race. In attempting to discuss his novels, the book approaches the psychoanalytical method and analyses what psychology operates behind his characters that perform different roles.

Focusing on D. H. Lawrence's concept of «essential criticism», which was introduced in his posthumously published «Study of Thomas Hardy» and his statement that «every work of art adheres to some system of morality. But it must contain the essential criticism on the morality to which it adheres», this book examines the ways in which Lawrence presents his ideas in his major novels The Rainbow and Women in Love. It explores how this concept plays a crucial role in his fiction as an «other» to the implied author's messages: functioning differently, as equivocation and creative strife, respectively, in The Rainbow and Women in Love, the concept helps to make these novels more dynamic that commonly realized.

In this study of D.H.Lawrence and critical theory, Robert Burden pays particular attention to the critical formations that underpin the reception history of the main novels, including the much maligned “leadership” novels, because strong readings have always contested the meaning and significance of Lawrence, and because there has been a persistent reluctance to approach his writing through post-structuralist theory. This study demonstrates in some detail that once Lawrence’s texts are the objects of the newer critical paradigms, their principles of coherence are understood differently; and that older notions of textual unity are displaced by aesthetic structures of degrees of generic and linguistic destabilization. This enables a radicalizing of Lawrence’s fiction by drawing out its deconstructive effects on his myth-making and essentialist notions of the self. The sexual identities represented in the fiction are read as experiments, or “thought adventures”, as Lawrence himself characterized his work. The different approaches to Lawrence’s writing in this study lead to a radical reassessment of his relationship to Modernism, especially in the light of the more elastic concept of Modernism in recent discussion, and one which traditional Lawrence scholars have ignored. What emerges is a more self-deconstructive Lawrence, with some surprising results.

In this intense analysis of the thematic interplay between Lawrence's critical prose and major fiction, Leo J. Dorbad argues persuasively that artistic expression in both genres provided the necessary groundwork for the novelist's subsequent efforts to consolidate his complex views on disharmony between the sexes. Covering the major fiction from Sons and Lovers (1913) to Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), the study demonstrates how Lawrence's answer to such strife, the need for intuitive sympathy between sexual partners, finds full-fledged implementation in his innovative approach to characterization.

In this exploration of the most innovative and iconoclastic modernist fiction, James J. Miracky studies the ways in which cultural forces and discourses of gender inflect the practice and theory of four British novelists: Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, May Sinclair, and D. H. Lawrence. Building on analyses of gender theory and formal innovation in Virginia Woolf's novels, this book examines Forster's queered use of fantasy, Sinclair's representation of manly genius in both male and female streams of consciousness, and Lawrence's quest for the novel of phallic consciousness. Reading each author's fiction alongside his or her theoretical writing, Miracky provides four diverse examples of how literary modernism wrestled with the gender crisis of the early twentieth century.