International Journal of Language & Literature

The Shangri-la Society in D.H. Lawrence’s the Man Who Loved Islands: Analytical Study
Dr. Youssef Mezrigui

Abstract
The Man Who Loved Islands, a short story by David Herbert Lawrence, which he wrote by the end of his literary career, is deemed to be one of his masterpieces. The historical background behind writing this literary work could be claimed to pertain to particular interrelated political, economic, and social factors in Europe during the first three decades of the twentieth century, namely the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the onset of Fascism, and all the conditions that were paving the way for the peak of the 1929 Economic Depression. Having apparently been touched more than somewhat by those disastrous conditions, and more precisely by the suffering they caused to people, D. H. Lawrence, as a man of letters, revolted against them allegorically through the central character of the novella. In point of fact, as the protagonist could not bear life in the mainland, he tried to create a self-sufficient world of his own on an island. In this frame of reference, relying on some literary critics’ works and on the author’s analytical reflections, this paper aims at exploring the extent to which D.H. Lawrence has succeeded in founding the world he was aspiring at with all the desired characteristics on an island through the main character.

Full Text: PDF      DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v4n1a30