A CHALLENGE TO ALL AUTHORITIES: D.H. LAWRENCE’S PROVOCATIVE REMOTE SOUTH

From his first travel book Twilight in Italy (1916) to the posthumously published Etruscan Places (1932), Lawrence’s travel writing shows a continuous experimentation with the genre, which in his hands, always escapes any fixed scheme. In spite of their stylistic difference and the variety of images and contents, his travel books lay bare a common intention, which is the author’s attempt to escape the wasteland of mechanization and industrialization, the upsetting, fragmented world of Europe at the time of World War I, and to find an ideal place for a rebirth, a palingenesis, a place (remote in space and, in the case of Etruscan Places, also in time) where human beings could live an harmonious relationship with Nature, with the Other and with the Self.