D.H. Lawrence's Border Crossing

📘 About This Book

D.H. Lawrence's Border Crossing builds upon developments within postcolonial theory to argue for a reconsideration of the concept of "spirit of place" in D. H. Lawrence’s travel books and "leadership" novels – works that record Lawrence’s various encounters with racial and geographical "others." Exploring his relationship to colonialism, Dr. Oh shows how Lawrence’s belief in different "spirits" belonging to these disparate places enables him to transcend the hierarchies between metropolis and colony, between civilized and "primitive" worlds.

📖 Summary

Eunyoung Oh’s scholarly work, D.H. Lawrence's Border Crossing, published in 2006, offers a sophisticated reevaluation of D.H. Lawrence's travel books and leadership novels through the sophisticated lens of postcolonial theory. Across its 213 pages, the book investigates how Lawrence engaged with racial and geographical others, reinterpreting his notorious focus on the spirit of place. Rather than viewing Lawrence simply through a conventional imperialist framework, Oh demonstrates that his work frequently complicated standard metropolitan assumptions. At the heart of the book is an examination of Lawrence's deep fascination with distinct spirits belonging to disparate parts of the world. Oh argues that this foundational belief allowed Lawrence to transcend traditional hierarchies that typically separated the metropolitan center from the colonial periphery, and the so-called civilized world from the primitive. By focusing on Lawrence's travel writings and his leadership novels—works deeply informed by his physical and psychological journeys across different landscapes—the author reveals a writer caught in complex negotiations with colonial power dynamics. Throughout the study, Oh illustrates how Lawrence's border crossings were not merely physical travels, but ideological and spiritual transgressions. His encounters with foreign geographies and diverse cultures forced him to confront his own European biases. Instead of imposing a rigid British framework onto the foreign spaces he visited, Lawrence often sought to surrender to the native vitality and unique atmospheres of those environments. This willingness to listen to the alterity of place enabled him to question the absolute dominance of Western civilization. Ultimately, D.H. Lawrence's Border Crossing contributes significantly to modernist literary criticism and postcolonial studies by rescuing Lawrence from simplistic charges of pure Eurocentrism or naive primitivism. Oh provides a nuanced reading that acknowledges Lawrence's flaws while highlighting the radical potential of his geographical and spiritual inquiries. Readers are left with a deeper understanding of how literature can mediate cross-cultural encounters and challenge entrenched global hierarchies through an attentive engagement with the natural and cultural spirit of place.

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