Lawrence’s reputation as a central figure of modernism has long been secure, but this new reading looks at his work in the light of a series of critical evaluations which first situated Lawrence as the leavisian hero of Cambridge criticism, and then reassessed him through recent cultural and literary theories. As well as examining Lawrence’s life through his struggles with the dominant discourses of his day - censorship law, The first World War and its politics, the growth of psychoanalysis, and feminism - This book reads Lawrence’s novels, stories, poetry and essays as an important site upon which contemporary debates around Class, nationality, and sexual identity need to be discussed. Lawrence emerges as a fascinatingly contradictory figure, whose work is pitched across a moment of acute sexual and cultural anxiety, manifest both in the texts themselves and in the powerful arguments which these have engendered.