Abstract

“Inertia” became a key term for D.H. Lawrence’s understanding of energy and materiality, leading him to a unique environmental aesthetics that stresses the body’s constant engagement with its surroundings. His articulation of “positive inertia” as an attention to the limits, needs, and fragility of human life serves as an important counterpoint to modernism’s obsession with autonomy, excess, and limitless production. Lawrence fully develops this critique in The Rainbow, where the negative inertia of industrialism and coal mining is juxtaposed to the positive inertia of familial generation and personal growth. This aesthetics of generation leads to a model of community based on ecological dependencies rather than hierarchical power structures.

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