Lawrence and Religion

It seems that Lawrence is really struggling with defining the place of religion in this novel. Critic Keith Cushman sees the novel as Lawrence's story of three generations of the Brangwen famiy that "traces the gradual evolution of English society from traditional culture to modernity" (xiii). Do you think that his treatment of religion--and its place in society--is linked to the change in the social construction of society? In other words, is the description of how the characters see religion, or their understanding of religion, simply a Lawrence idiosyncracy or an exploration of how the place of religion was changing in early modern England?

My apologies for the late post. I was away from a computer both literally for some of the time since Thursday and figuratively for the entire time.

Hardy and Nature

It wasn't clear to me that anyone had actually read the Eagleton chapter. If you did, you should have let me know.

At any rate, Eagleton states that when Hardy "looks at a landscape or a piece of Nature, he is usually preoccupied less by the thing itself than by the traces of history and humanity inscribed within it" (192). How does FFMC illustrate this observation?