ABSTRACT
Emerging modern novelists often used essays and other platforms in order to spin their aesthetic practices as unique, breaking away from the plot-driven narratives associated with the nineteenth century, especially in Victorian novels. The binary between emotion and reason that emerged during the Enlightenment, exemplified in Immanuel Kant's work on the sublime, only intensified with the narrative of progress in the Victorian era. To modern novelists, the glorification of reason as a way to justify progress, which often led to the marginalization and exploitation of other people through the mechanisms of patriarchy, imperialism, and racism, offered a particular problem for the modern novelist. Of these novelists, Lawrence wrote vociferously and directly about issues of emotion/feeling related to the body, and he is the most confrontational in his work about the problems of reason. Lawrence, Woolf, Forster, and to a lesser extent, Faulkner seek to represent a transcendent, emotional core in their novels.
