ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the notion of elitism in D.H. Lawrence's early novels The Rainbow and Women in Love, in the light of that expansion of the field of modernist studies that has this "planetary" outlook and blurs the sharp division between high and low culture. It discusses that cosmopolitanism in a larger sense, as far as a distinction of class is concerned, and in relation to the opposition between the community, and foreigners as the defining other to which the community is exposed. The chapter explores how modernism has provoked mixed feelings and passionate reactions, it needs to continue accounting for the fact that D.H. Lawrence's biography and bibliography have met a similar fate. It deals with Women in Love, Levenson plays on the phrase in the novel "a fine passion of opposition", and opposition certainly is a key concept on which both The Rainbow and Women in Love are constructed.
