Unseen Prose - Critical and contextual materials

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Instructions

Click on the prompts button before reading the three extracts.
Consider the questions in the prompts as you read the three extracts and then discuss.

During the writing of The Rainbow, Lawrence described it as “like a novel in a foreign language”, foreign I think because he knew it was unlike any other in the history of the British novel, and because the ideas developed in it required a special vocabulary for their utterance. The language of the novel is both new yet also familiar, new in the representation of the inner consciousness of its characters and familiar through Lawrence’s call on the rhythms and phrases known to us from the Bible from which the central symbol of the rainbow and the associated symbol of the flood derives. Indeed the novel is saturated with biblical allusions and references, and the idea of what constitutes religion for the individual is one of its themes. I think Lawrence’s sense of the novel’s ‘foreigness’ is commonly experienced by readers as we seek to understand it. At one level it yields familiar pleasures, as in his handling of the Midlands landscape of its setting, where the rural world of the Brangwen’s farm abuts on the industrial landscape of the coal mine, in the realization of striking scenes and in the sharply drawn individuality of its characters. However, these pleasures come in conjunction with a set of ideas commonly called Lawrence’s ‘metaphysic’ and these contribute to the novel’s originality and to the difficulties of reading it.