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This chapter examines the antagonistic relationship with Nietzsche’s Greeks that was managed by one of the main writers of modernism, D. H. Lawrence. By thinking about the position of Nietzsche in the British intellectual climate of the early twentieth century, and in particular his association to the anti-Germanic feeling surrounding the First World War, this chapter contextualises the tension between Lawrence’s antipathy towards Nietzsche and the clear resonances between the two authors’ attitudes towards the irrational nature of ancient Greece. The chapter examines the differing attitudes towards tragedy that Lawrence puts forward across his voluminous writings, including especially his 1920 novel Women in Love, his critical-theoretical essay ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ (written 1914/1915, published posthumously in 1946), and his travel writings about his visits to Etruscan tombs. It uses the idea of the ‘gay science’, which Lawrence took from Nietzsche’s work of the same name from 1882, to situate Lawrence’s desire to establish an anti-tragic form of art and literature with a genealogy that stretches back to antiquity.
The Gay Science is a prime example of what is often called Friedrich Nietzsche's 'aphoristic' style. In his earlier works, Nietzsche had moved gradually towards this style. The Gay Science marks a decisive step beyond the books that came before it because it introduces two of what were to become Nietzsche's best-known themes, the Death of God and the Eternal Recurrence. Nietzsche has been thought by some people to have had a brutal and ruthless attitude to the world; sometimes, perhaps, he wished that he had. Nietzsche recognizes that his own Birth of Tragedy had been full of the Schopenhauerian spirit. The truths of Nietzsche's own philosophy, which discredit the metaphysical world, can destructively lead to nihilism if they come to be accepted. In The Gay Science he stresses the importance of a law of agreement, which regulates people's thoughts and provides intellectual security.
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