D.H. Lawrence's plural jurisprudence: an enquiry into Desmond Manderson's post-positivist 'law and literature'

The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different; life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped and you find yourself speechless among the money-changers. Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads This article draws on Desmond Manderson's theorisation of ‘law and literature’ in order to undertake a jurisprudential reading of the last two ‘leadership novels’ that D.H. Lawrence published in the 1920s: Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent. This reading demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses in Manderson's methodology while simultaneously contextualising the experience of modernity through Lawrence's Australian and Mexican narratives. In sum, the article tests Manderson's (Australian) jurisprudential reading of Kangaroo with the troubled (Mexican) modernity that emerged from the Mexican Revolution, as it is channelled through The Plumed Serpent.