Late in the lengthy, posthumously published essay, “The Education of the People,” D.H. Lawrence associates the continuation of the infant’s early education into “physical motion” with “the keen, fierce, unremitting swiftness of the parent, whose warm love opens the valves of glad motion in the child, so that the child plays in delicious security and freedom.” In this polemical essay as well as in his critical writings on psychoanalysis, his fiction, his poetry, his drama, his literary criticism, his letters, and beyond Lawrence’s oeuvre is populated with discussions of childhood education, scenes that catch children at moments of developmental crisis or confusion, and children placed at the margins of fictional worlds—as in The Woman Who Rode Away (1924), where the only appearance of a child agitates the protagonist who is the middle of her flight. “‘Why are you going alone, Mother?’ asked her son, as she made up parcels of food. / ‘Am I never to be alone? Not one moment of my life?’ [s]he cried, with sudden explosion of energy. And the child . . . shrank into silence.” This brief scene raises many questions—as does Lawrence’s entire oeuvre—about security, freedom, and children’s precarity and resilience.

The D.H. Lawrence Society of North America invites papers that study Lawrence’s elaboration on the lives of children in his life and work. Possible topics include but are not limited to: 

• Lawrence’s challenge(s) to Freudian theories of childhood
• Sibling relationships
• Childhood/adolescent friendships
• Pregnancy/maternity
• Childhood affects
• Parent-child or guardian-child relationships
• Parental substitutes
• Attachment theories
• Theories of play
• Lawrence’s pedagogy
• Lawrence’s views and portrayals of elementary schools and education
• Children of working-class parents
• Children and class difference
• Children and gender difference
• Children and poverty
• Children in/as nature
• Children in Lawrence’s poetry
• Children at the nexus of human-animal difference
• Childhood precarity and/or trauma

Please send an abstract (200-300 words), a short bio, and any A/V requirements or scheduling requests by July 30, 2023 to Benjamin Hagen (Benjamin.Hagen@usd.edu).