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The DHLSNA is a non-profit academic organization interested in D. H. Lawrence and all his works—poetry, fiction, drama, essays, travel writing, literary criticism, painting, and letters; in scholarship on Lawrence; and in creative works inspired by him. Anyone may join.
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News & Conference Announcement
NEMLA 2027 What exactly is nostalgia? Do we tend to idealize events of the past simply because they are completed and unchangeable while the present is in flux and the future is unknown? How much do we distort the past in order to create a positive image of it? While the function of memory is crucial for what D.W. Winnicott calls “continuity of being” or a consistent sense of identity, how does a nostalgic view of the past affect our sense of self if memory is subject to distortion? D.H. Lawrence was ambivalent about nostalgia. He evokes the biblical story of Lot’s wife in the poem “She Looks Back” and in the novel Aaron’s Rod to express the dangers of looking back. In his own life, although he himself was at times prone to nostalgia, he was more often skeptical about returning to the past: “I feel at once a devouring nostalgia and an infinite repulsion,” he wrote in an essay about returning to his hometown in the autumn of 1926 (LEA 15). Partly because he loathed aspects of the industrialized modern world he lived in and longed for what he considered to be a more halcyon bygone era, Lawrence explored various facets of nostalgia in his writing.In his creative work, Lawrence could be dismissive of nostalgia, as we see with the evocation of Lot’s wife, whose looking back resulted in her being turned into a pillar of salt. But he could also describe nostalgia as an intense longing, as, for example, in the novel Kangaroo: “Torture of nostalgia. He craved to be back, his soul was there” (K 248). Is nostalgia most attractive in Lawrence’s work when the thread of continuity of being is frayed by present events and a return to the past, literal or imaginative, promises a mending of that thread? Is there a cultural nostalgia that Lawrence participated in, one based on the Christian concept of humanity’s lost paradise in the mythical past? For its 2027 NEMLA panel in Newport, RI, (March 6-9, 2027) the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America invites papers that may examine Lawrence’s exploration of nostalgia in any genre and from any angle. Abstracts of 250-300 words should be sent to the official NEMLA submission portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22628. Please also send a notice of submission and a brief bio to Ron Granofsky at granofsk@mcmaster.ca. The deadline for submission is September 30, 2026.
17th International D.H. Lawrence Conference, Aix-Marseille 02-08 July 2028 Lawrence and the Mediterranean
Co-sponsored by the English Department of Aix-Marseille University, France, the English Department of Paris Nanterre University, France and the D. H. Lawrence Society of North America
Conference Dates: 02-08 July 2028 (Sunday-Saturday)
Conference Site: Aix-en-Provence, France (Aix-Marseille University)
Conference organizers: Fiona Fleming (Paris-Nanterre University), Tim Gupwell (Paul Valéry Montpellier University) and Nicolas P. Boileau (Aix-Marseille University)
Call for Papers
“I am thinking of Lawrence here. He worshipped the sun. Light and tuberculosis: these are the two things Lawrence and Spinoza have in common” (Deleuze, Lectures on Spinoza at Vincennes)
Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
and the long journey towards oblivion.
The apples falling like great drops of dew
to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.
And it is time to go, to bid farewell
to one’s own self, and find an exit
from the fallen self.
(The Ship of Death, D. H. Lawrence)
D. H. Lawrence, great lover of the sun, who finally succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of 44, is undoubtedly one of the greatest English writers of the Twentieth Century, and this conference seeks to revisit the final months of his life (1885-1930) in the south of France, and in the Mediterranean in general—addressing the tensions of his life in Italy, Spain and Switzerland, his admiration for the work of Paul Cézanne, his interest in light and colours—and the debilitating effects of illness. We seek to work on his fiction, non-fiction, and poetry (particularly in these later years), and to reassess the not unambiguous impression made upon him and his writings by the Mediterranean.
In October 1928, Lawrence and Frieda had left Baden-Baden in Germany for the south of France and first stayed in Le Lavandou, a village east of Marseilles and Toulon, travelling to the island Port Cros before moving to Bandol and ultimately to Vence where he finally passed away in March 1930. The Mediterranean had of course been a source of enchantment and inspiration much earlier in Lawrence’s life, during his stays in Sicily, Sardinia and the north-western coast of Italy, but it seems to have held an even greater appeal during the last two years of his life in France, after cold weather and dull scenery had severely damaged his health and state of mind. On the 27th of September 1929 he wrote to Earl Brewster:
We arrived Monday evening – three days ago. It seemed very lovely – so full of light and a certain newness. I am already much better. In Germany I felt I should certainly die – awful – It was psychic depression. The Germans are in an awful state, inwardly – but horrible. I feel that nothing will ever again take me north of Lyon. I dread and hate the north, it is full of death and the most grisly disappointment. I feel already nearly myself again here – the sun and sea, the great light, and the natural people. I can breathe. In the north, I can’t breathe. (Letters 7, 494)
Lawrence sometimes seems to associate the natural with the sun and with life (the Mediterranean peoples), whereas ego-bound selves (from the north) are linked to death and unhealthiness. Previous collective volumes, Windows to the Sun (Ed. Ingersoll & Hyde), Lake Garda: Gateway to D. H. Lawrence’s Voyage to the Sun (Ed. Ceramella), looked at Lawrence’s lifelong fascination with the sun. We propose to build on these earlier contributions, looking in depth at the relationship between the sun and healthiness, or illness.
In his article ‘The Real Thing’ Lawrence wrote, shortly before his death from tuberculosis: ‘what makes life good to me is the sense that, even if I am sick and ill, I am alive, alive to the depths of my soul, and in touch somewhere, in touch with the vivid life of the cosmos. Somehow my life draws strength from the depths of the universe’ (LEA 310). Can the non-human world, in other words, be seen as a source of recovery? The great importance of the sun for Lawrence is obvious in his last pieces of writing such as the non-fictional ‘Apocalypse’, the critical review ‘Chaos in Poetry’, or short stories like ‘The Man who Died’ (1929), or ‘Sun’ (revised in 1928), in which the doctor says: ‘TAKE HER AWAY, into the sun’. Indeed, the sun always seems to stand for something far greater in Lawrence’s writings, particularly Lawrence’s later writings. In ‘Making Pictures’ he asserts that ‘the divine is not only good, it is all things’, and claims that the divine may be seen in natural objects (LEA 229).
On the other hand, one recurring complaint of Lawrence’s during his stays on the French Riviera was that the coast was being too built-up and becoming ‘artificial’ with the intrusive ‘human-all-too-human’ world repeatedly casting a shadow upon the magnificence of the Mediterranean: ‘They are just beginning to mess this coast up – but the messing seems to proceed rapidly, once it starts. Little villas “tout confort” – yes, my word. Very comforting to the eye!’ (Letters 7, 588). We also wish to look at this constant tension in Lawrence’s writings between the objectionable intrusiveness of modern man, and the cosmos as a source of renewal, or even as a force for healing from the unhealthy influences of the modern world. Other possible readings might pursue either the kind of psycho-geographic approach employed by Terry Gifford in his recent book D. H. Lawrence, Ecofeminism and Nature (2023), in which he argues that Lawrence’s writing in Sea and Sardinia can be seen as an exploration of a more symbiotic, bidirectional relationship between writer and place, or it might draw on the developing field of the ‘Blue Humanities’, such as in Gifford’s article in the D. H. Lawrence Review (46.1.2) on the short story ‘The Flying Fish’, written shortly after Lawrence was diagnosed with tuberculosis.
Finally, this conference will also look at Lawrence’s relationship with that famous denizen of Aix-en-Provence Cézanne, to whom Lawrence had unsurprisingly turned towards the end of 1928, discussing him (and other painters) in the remarkable ‘Introduction to these Paintings’. For Lawrence, unlike the Impressionist painters, this flight into light is merely illusory, meaningless, an escape ‘into the grand néant, the great nowhere’ (LEA 197), and the importance of the Mediterranean lies elsewhere. Lawrence suggests that Cézanne was engaged in a heroic struggle (LEA 204) between the ready-made clichés of the man-made world and a deeper ‘naïve Mediterranean sense’ of the truth or reality of the cosmos: ‘in him was the little flame of life where he felt things to be true’ (LEA 205).
Conference Theme
The conference theme seeks to explore these tensions in Lawrence’s earlier as well as later works, and invites papers on any aspect of Lawrence’s works that is concerned with the constant attention to life.
Possible themes may include the following, although these are not exhaustive, and we also welcome other approaches and any new work on Lawrence:
Individual paper submissions: Abstracts of about no more than 400 words together with a proposed title and a short biobibliography should be sent to all three organizers by the 18th of December 2026
Panel proposals: We welcome suggestions for specific panels. A title, a list of contributors together with their affiliations (no more than 4), a list of proposed abstracts (400 words max), and short biobibliograpies should be sent to all three organizers by the 18th of December 2026
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This turquoise horse was used as the logo for the Santa Fe International Lawrence Conference (2005), courtesy of David Barnes.
"Dear old Azure Horse, Turquoise Horse, Hobby Horse, Trogan Horse with a few scared heroes in your belly; Horse, laughing your Horse Laugh, you do actually ramp in with a bit of horse sense. I'm all for horse sense, O Horsie!"--D.H.L.
(From "Dear Old Horse, A London Letter," in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, CUP, p. 137)
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⌛️Countdown to 30 August 2024! Don't miss the abstract submission deadline for the biggest event in #DHLawrence studies!Join us for the 16th International D. H. Lawrence Conference in Mexico City🇲🇽, from 11-15 August 2025.CFP👇
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