Can fiction be modernist when it aims to help us to recapture a premodern, or even 'primitive', relationship with nature and with our own bodies, and dissolve boundaries between the self and the world? This is the question we must answer in considering D. H. Lawrence’s (1885-1930) conflictual relationship with literary modernism. In Lawrence’s most challenging statements about the purpose of the novel, he emerges as something like an ecological antimodernist, continuing a tradition of Romantic organicism which modernism often appears to leave behind.

The novel, in Lawrence’s view, goes astray when it affiliates itself with specific types of experimental modernism, because its real benefits derive from its potential to help us to resist the damaging effects of modernity. The novel’s immediate task might be to offer us aesthetic representations of the world in all its complexity, but this task, for Lawrence, is part of a greater project of cultural regeneration. In a series of essays written in 1923 and 1925, including 'Art and Morality' and 'Why the Novel Matters', Lawrence shows an unrestrained contempt for the modernist novel, at least as it is practised by some of his celebrated contemporaries. He argues that there are three categories of modern fiction: 'serious', 'popular' and 'valuable'. 'Serious' and 'popular' fiction represent fiction as it is being written in the 1920s, and both derive from and propagate the self-consciousness which Lawrence regards as the great problem of modern culture. Self-consciousness, and here Lawrence is influenced by his reading of Friedrich Nietzsche, is an awareness of self as separated from the natural world, a mental condition arising from the influence of modern, rational, scientific thought, with its dualisms and harsh delineation of subject and object.