Hardy: A Collection of Critical Essays by
In an era of often uncritical optimism, Hardy looked upon mankind with dark brooding wisdom. He dared to speak of sexual conflict of man's self-destructiveness, of grotesque mischance. Today his skepticism, his narrative inventiveness, and hostility to realism, and his psychological insight make him a congenial even contemporary voice.
The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary by 
Reading Thomas Hardy by
This major new reading of the novels of Thomas Hardy by leading critic George Levine disentangles the author's often elaborately distanced prose from his beautiful poetic and precise renderings of the natural world. Clear, direct and minimally academic in his own writing, Levine provides an overview and Hardy's entire fictional canon, with extensive discussions of his early and late novels including his last, The Well-Beloved. In so doing Levine draws new attention to the way Hardy absorbed both the ideas and the writing strategies of Charles Darwin, and develops new perspectives first articulated in the literary responses of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Levine departs from the critical norm by reading Hardy in the context of his deep feeling for the natural world and all living things, and the implicit affirmation of life and sometimes drives his bleakest narratives.
Thomas Hardy by
A collection of critical essays on Hardy, his novels, and poems with a chronology of events in the author's life.
Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge by
A collection of six critical essays on the Hardy novel, arranged in chronological order of their original publication.
Twentieth Century Interpretations of Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Collection of Critical Essays by 
The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy by 
The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy by 
The Expression of Things by
John Hughes explores Thomas Hardy's claim that his art sought to'intensify the expression of things'through three main sections: music, the body, and voice. These themes offer intersecting and mutually informing discussions of the central drama of inexpression and expressivity in Hardy's work as it affects the various persona of the text, including the reader. Throughout, the book draws on themes in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell to reveal how Hardy's fiction and poetry express and represent the affective and physical conditions of mind, and their conflicts with social fictions of identity. The first section on music examines how Hardy's writing stages musical experience as an expression of human desire and individuality at odds with the constraints of rationality, Victorian fiction form, and social convention. Extensive readings are linked to the larger contextual and theoretical issues in order to show how music as a theme and motif highlights the kinds of creativity and ethical cruxes that characterize Hardy's work. The second section on'embodiment and sensation'shows how close attention to Hardy's writing on the topics of facial and bodily expression (and affectivity) reveal much about the sources of his inspiration, and its philosophical conditions and implications. The third section on'voice'employs a close metrical reading of an important Hardy poem within its larger biographical and inter-textual contexts. These readings demonstrate how fundamental were Hardy's innovations in meter to the power and originality of his work, and to its expressive treatment of his abiding preoccupations with love, grief, childhood, and the loss of faith.
Thomas Hardy by
The author offers close readings of Thomas Hardy's poetry and novels, regarding these as expressive forms of everyday and professional acts of the imagination. Hardy is placed in the long tradition of writers who subject is not art but imagination and whose most interesting aesthetic introspectionÆs, like those of Jane Austen and George Eliot, are oblique or sub-textual. So what the reader follows here is Hardy's imagining of imagination in his elegies and nature poems and in his major characters from Gabriel Oak to Tess and Jude.The themes and forms examined by Barbara Hardy include narrative, conversation, gossip, memory, gender, poetry of place and imaginative thresholds. Altogether the study is a lucid and accessible introduction, which locates Hardy's place in the tradition of English literature.
Thomas Hardy by
Thomas Hardy was the foremost novelist of his time, as well as an established poet. Author of Jude the Obscure and Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy reflected in his works the dynamics of social, intellectual and aesthetic change in nineteenth-century England.This guide provides students with a lucid introduction to Hardy's life and works and the basis for a sound comprehension of his work, including: the major aspects of Hardy's life in the context of contemporary culture a detailed commentary on Hardy's most important work and a critical map of Hardy's complete writing an outline of the vast body of criticism that has built up around Hardy's work with examples of recent critical debate. Exposition and guide, this volume enables readers to form their own readings of one of the most important writers of the nineteenth century.
Thomas Hardy by
Michael Millgate's classic biography of the great novelist and poet Thomas Hardy was first published in 1982. Much new information about Hardy has since become available, often in volumes edited or co-edited by Millgate himself, and many established assumptions have been challenged and revolutionized by scholarly research. In this extensively revised, fully reconsidered, and considerably expanded new edition the world's leading Hardy scholar draws not only upon these new materials but upon an exceptional understanding of Hardy gained from long immersion in the study of his life and work. Many large and small aspects of Hardy's life are here freshly illuminated, including his family background, his fumbling self-education as a poet, his difficult relations with his first wife and hers with his family, his sexual infatuations, his secret collaborations with aspiring women writers, his clandestine composition of his own official biography, and the memory-invoking techniques by which he sustained his remarkable creativity into extreme old age. Thorough, authoritative, and eminently readable, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited is now the standard life of Hardy for a new generation.
Thomas Hardy by
Because Thomas Hardy's poetry and fiction are so closely associated with Wessex, it is easy to forget that he was, in his own words, half a Londoner, moving between country and capital throughout his life. This self-division, Mark Ford says, can be traced not only in works explicitly set in London but in his most regionally circumscribed novels.
Thomas Hardy by
Widely popular throughout the world, Hardy still seems to speak to us, in fiction and in poetry, as our contemporary. In this new edition of his popular study, Peter Widdowson identifies the elements in his work which enable Hardy to be read in this way: the focus on unstable class and sexual relations in a society undergoing rapid change; the highly-charged and contradictory representations of women at the heart of this dangerously ‘metamorphic'social process; the self-reflexive artifice of the writing itself as an aspect of Hardy's ‘satiric'worldview; his ironic humanism in the ‘new Dark Age'of the modern world. Drawing on contemporary approaches to literary study in an accessible way, the author shows where this radical and destabilizing Hardy is to be located in the texts; and similarly seeks to recast our conception of Hardy the Poet by showing how preconceived and selective it is. For this edition, Professor Widdowson has updated the Select Bibliography and has also included a ‘Postscript'on film and TV adaptation of Hardy's fiction, since many newcomers to Hardy may these days experience his work for the first time in this medium. This lucid and engaging study offers a comprehensive guide to reading Hardy anew as a writer who continues to challenge our assumptions about art and life.
Thomas Hardy: 'Tess of the D'Urberviles': Humanities Insights by
This critical and contextual study by a distinguished critic sheds new light on Hardy's famous novel of rural life, sexual desire and tragic irony. The co-ordinating theme of this study is that Hardy designed Tess of the d'Urbervilles to be controversial, and it has surpassed his design. An initial biographical chapter relates Tess to Hardy's career: the novel caused scandal but brought him wealth. Next, the work's process of composition is discussed, and differences between the censored serial and the book versions are explained. An analysis of the plot gives particular attention to its ironic strategies, and a further section deals with problematic aspects of characterisation, including the views of the narrator. Various themes and contexts are explored, notably Hardy's attitudes to religion, evolution, politics and sexuality. There follows a discussion of selected literary aspects: naturalism and realism, leitmotifs and thematic patterns, optical effects and defamiliarisation, and the use of specialised vocabularies. Hardy's descriptive powers when rendering the rural world receive particular analysis. A critical survey then summarises critical approaches to this novel between Hardy's day and the present.'
Thomas Hardy and the Survivals of Time by
A systematic exploration of Thomas Hardy's imaginative assimilation of particular Victorian sciences, this study draws on and swells the widening current of scholarly attention now being paid to the cultural meanings compacted and released by the nascent'sciences of man'in the nineteenth century. Andrew Radford here situates Hardy's fiction and poetry in a context of the new sciences of humankind that evolved during the Victorian age to accommodate an immense range of literal and figurative'excavations'then taking place. Combining literary close readings with broad historical analyses, he explores Hardy's artistic response to geological, archaeological and anthropological findings. In particular, he analyzes Hardy's lifelong fascination with the doctrine of'survivals,'a term coined by E.B. Tylor in Primitive Culture (1871) to denote customs, beliefs and practices persisting in isolation from their original cultural context. Radford reveals how Hardy's subtle reworking of Tylor's doctrine offers a valuable insight into the inter-penetration of science and literature during this period. An important aspect of Radford's research focuses on lesser known periodical literature that grew out of a British amateur antiquarian tradition of the nineteenth century. His readings of Hardy's literary notebooks disclose the degree to which Hardy's own considerable scientific knowledge was shaped by the middlebrow periodical press. Thus Thomas Hardy and the Survivals of Time raises questions not only about the reception of scientific ideas but also the creation of nonspecialist forms of scientific discourse. This book represents a genuinely new perspective for Hardy studies.
Thomas Hardy in Context by
This collection covers the range of Thomas Hardy's works and their social and intellectual contexts, providing a comprehensive introduction to Hardy's life and times. Featuring short, lively contributions from forty-four international scholars, the volume explores the processes by which Hardy the man became Hardy the published writer; the changing critical responses to his work; his response to the social and political challenges of his time; his engagement with contemporary intellectual debate; and his legacy in the twentieth century and after. Emphasising the subtle and ongoing interaction between Hardy's life, his creative achievement and the unique historical moment, the collection also examines Hardy's relationship to such issues as class, education, folklore, archaeology and anthropology, evolution, marriage and masculinity, empire and the arts. A valuable contextual reference for scholars of Victorian and modernist literature, the collection will also prove accessible for the general reader of Hardy.
Far From the Madding Crowd by
Bathsheba Everdene is courted by three young men: an adventurer, a young farmer who becomes bailiff of the farm she inherits, and a neighboring farmer.
Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles by Jude the Obscure by
Jude Fawley, an obscure member of the artisan class, aspires to become a minister and wages battle against enormous odds.
The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character by
Thomas Hardy's first masterpiece, The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with a scene of such heartlessness and cruelty that it still shocks readers today. A poor workman named Michael Henchard, in a fit of drunken rage, sells his wife and baby daughter to a stranger at a country fair. Stricken with remorse, Henchard forswears alcohol and works hard to become a prosperous businessman and the respected mayor of Casterbridge. But he cannot erase his past. His wife ultimately returns to offer Henchard the choice of redemption or a further descent into his own self-destructive nature. A dark, complex story, The Mayor of Casterbridge brims with invention, vitality, and even wit.
The Poetry of Thomas Hardy by The Return of the Native by
Story of Egdon Heath and Eustacia Vye in late nineteenth century Wessex, England. Set in the vast, brooding heathlands of England, it lays bare the frailties of human love, as beautiful Eustacia is torn between two suitors--one who would help her escape her routine life in nineteenth-century rural England, and another who would make their home the Wessex heath where he was raised.
The Trumpet-Major: John Loveday, A Soldier in the War with Buonaparte and Robert His Brother, First Mate in the Merchant Service; A Tale. by
The heroine, Anne Garland, is pursued by three suitors: John Loveday, the trumpet major in a British regiment, honest and loyal; his brother Bob, a flighty sailor; and Festus Derriman, the cowardly son of the local squire. The setting is the Napoleonic wars, and it seems Miss Garland has a penchant for men in uniform. Of the two brothers, John fights with Wellington in the Peninsular War, and Bob serves with Nelson at Trafalgar. Unusually for a Hardy novel, most of the characters live happily ever after; however, the ending is debatably an ominous one.
Two on a Tower by
Two on a Tower is Hardy's most complete and daring treatment of the theme of love between characters of different classes and ages. This sensational tale, which some reviewers of the first publication considered to be immoral, is informed throughout by the astronomical images and reflections that preoccupied Hardy at the time of the book's composition.
Under the Greenwood Tree: or, The Mellstock Quire: A Rural Painting of the Dutch School by
The plot concerns the activities of a group of church musicians, the Mellstock parish choir, one of whom, Dick Dewy, becomes romantically entangled with a comely new school mistress, Fancy Day. The novel opens with the fiddlers and singers of the choir{u2014}including Dick, his father Reuben Dewy, and grandfather William Dewy{u2014}making the rounds in Mellstock village on Christmas Eve. When the little band plays at the schoolhouse, young Dick falls for Fancy at first sight. Dick, smitten, seeks to insinuate himself into her life and affections, but Fancy's beauty has gained her other suitors, including a rich farmer and the new vicar at the parish church.
A Changed Man by
Dip a toe into the literary oeuvre of British novelist and poet Thomas Hardy in this well-curated collection of some of his best short stories. Hardy was famed for his ability to create characters who struggle mightily against social mores and circumstances beyond their control, and this strength shines in the finely drawn characters who populate these tales.
A Group of Noble Dames by
A collection of ten short stories by Thomas Hardy, many of them set in his famous fictional county of Wessex.
Life's Little Ironies by
Short stories are a perfect way to enjoy and appreciate classic literature in reader-friendly, bite-sized chunks. This collection of perfectly polished little gems from Thomas Hardy, author of works such as Return of the Native and Far from the Madding Crowd, offers a great introduction to this renowned author.
The Mayor of Casterbridge by
The woman is no good to me. Who'll have her?'Michael Henchard is an out-of-work hay-trusser who gets drunk at a local fair and impulsively sells his wife Susan and baby daughter. Eighteen years later Susan and her daughter seek him out, only to discover that he has become the most prominent man in Casterbridge. Henchard attempts to make amends for his youthful misdeeds but his unchanged impulsiveness clouds his relationships in love as well as his fortunes in business. Although Henchard is fated to be a modern-day tragic hero, unable to survive in the new commercial world, his story is also a journey towards love. This edition is the only critically established text of the novel, based on a comprehensive study of the manuscript and Hardy's extensive revisions.
A Pair of Blue Eyes by
Elfride Swancourt was a girl whose emotions lay very near the surface.'Elfride is the daughter of the Rector of Endelstow, a remote sea-swept parish in Cornwall based on St Juliot, where Hardy began the book during the first days of his courtship of his first wife Emma. Blue-eyed and high-spirited, Elfride has little experience of the world beyond, and becomes entangled with two men: the boyish architect, Stephen Smith, and the older literary man, Henry Knight. The former friends become rivals, and Elfride faces an agonizing choice. Written at a crucial time in Hardy's life, A Pair of Blue Eyes expresses more directly than any of his novels the events and social forces that made him the writer he was. Elfride's dilemma mirrors the difficult decision Hardy himself had to make with this novel: to pursue the profession of architecture, where he was established, or literature, where he had yet to make his name?
The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid by
Thomas Hardy (1840 – 1928) was a naturalist and writer, whose fiction sits on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution and is filled with an imminent sense of nostalgia for the coming transformation of the British countryside. He was also a ferocious critic of the unfair treatment of women both sexually and socially in Victorian society. The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid is set in Hardy's alternate landscape, called Wessex after the old kingdom in south-west England.
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by
She looked absolutely pure. Nature, in her fantastic trickery, had set such a seal of maidenhood upon Tess's countenance that he gazed at her with a stupefied air:'Tess- say it is not true! No, it is not true!''Young Tess Durbeyfield attempts to restore her family's fortunes by claiming their connection with the aristocratic d'Urbervilles. But Alec d'Urberville is a rich wastrel who seduces her and makes her life miserable. When Tess meets Angel Clare, she is offered true love and happiness, but her past catches up with her and she faces an agonizing moral choice. Hardy's indictment of society's double standards, and his depiction of Tess as'a pure woman', caused controversy in his day and has held the imagination of readers ever since. Hardy thought it his finest novel, and Tess the most deeply felt character he ever created. This unique critical text is taken from the authoritative Clarendon edition, which is based on the manuscript collated with all Hardy's subsequent revisions.
Thomas Hardy's the Well Beloved by
Thomas Hardy (2nd June 1840 – 11th January 1928), celebrated poet and writer, was born in a modest thatched cottage near Dorchester in the West country, to a builder father. His mother came from a line of intelligent, lively and ambitious women so ensured her son had the best formal education available for their modest means although this ended when he was 16. He became a draughtsman specialising in the building of churches was able to give it up to be a full time writer and poet with the publication of Far From the Madding Crown which became a bestseller and like much of his work was serialised. His writing reflects his passionate beliefs for social reform and exposes the hypocrisy of the rules of the Victorian age which constrained many freedoms with convention and restricted the transcending of class boundaries. His novels are almost entirely set in rural Wessex which although fictional is clearly rooted in the SW counties of England where he was born and lived most of his life. Hardy's writing caused controversy in his lifetime but despite this he was highly praised and showered with honorary doctorates from many universities, a knighthood, which he refused and in 1910 the prestigious Order of the Merit. This book is set on the rugged peninsular Isle of Slingers and follows the lifelong quest of acclaimed sculptor Jocelyn Pierston for his elusive ideal woman, the Well Beloved of the title. Whilst he is able to animate her beauty in stone he is unable to find her in one woman but does eventually fall in love successively with three women at the age of 20, 40 and 60 who are all from the same family, mother, daughter and granddaughter. There are twists and turns through the story of the superficial nature of romantic love, obsession, infatuation and growing old. Hardy depicts the landscape and its people so evocatively that many feel it is the most beautiful prose he has ever written. Hardy noted that Marcel Proust developed “the theory exhibited in The Well Beloved” claiming that when we fall in love it is essentially with a figment of our own invention.
Thomas Hardy's the Woodlanders by
Thomas Hardy (2nd June 1840 – 11th January 1928), celebrated poet and writer, was born in a modest thatched cottage near Dorchester in the West country, to a builder father. His mother came from a line of intelligent, lively and ambitious women so ensured her son had the best formal education available for their modest means although this ended when he was 16. He became a draughtsman specialising in the building of churches was able to give it up to be a full time writer and poet with the publication of Far From the Madding Crown which became a bestseller and like much of his work was serialised. His writing reflects his passionate beliefs for social reform and exposes the hypocrisy of the rules of the Victorian age which constrained many freedoms with convention and restricted the transcending of class boundaries. His novels are almost entirely set in rural Wessex which although fictional is clearly rooted in the SW counties of England where he was born and lived most of his life. Hardy's writing caused controversy in his lifetime but despite this he was highly praised and showered with honorary doctorates from many universities, a knighthood, which he refused and in 1910 the prestigious Order of the Merit. The relationship between man and trees is a recurrent theme in Hardy's work and here in The Woodlanders it is explored in depth with the characters being fellow inhabitants with the trees and their struggles interconnected with the trees. Set in the familiar Dorset landscape this novel follows the fortunes of Giles Winterbourne, a good hearted native of the area who works as a yeoman. His childhood sweetheart Grace Melbury has been away to private school and stayed on as a governess. On her return Giles'love for her is challenged by rival, Edred Fitzpierrs, a young and dashing doctor who wins her hand in marriage. This match is an unhappy one and affects the woodland community in this extraordinary novel.
Thomas Hardy's Two on a Tower by
Thomas Hardy (2nd June 1840 – 11th January 1928), celebrated poet and writer, was born in a modest thatched cottage near Dorchester in the West country, to a builder father. His mother came from a line of intelligent, lively and ambitious women so ensured her son had the best formal education available for their modest means although this ended when he was 16. He became a draughtsman specialising in the building of churches was able to give it up to be a full time writer and poet with the publication of Far From the Madding Crown which became a bestseller and like much of his work was serialised. His writing reflects his passionate beliefs for social reform and exposes the hypocrisy of the rules of the Victorian age which constrained many freedoms with convention and restricted the transcending of class boundaries. His novels are almost entirely set in rural Wessex which although fictional is clearly rooted in the SW counties of England where he was born and lived most of his life. Hardy's writing caused controversy in his lifetime but despite this he was highly praised and showered with honorary doctorates from many universities, a knighthood, which he refused and in 1910 the prestigious Order of the Merit. Hardy sets out the premise of Two on a Tower in the preface as a “a wish to set the emotional history of two infinitesimal lives against the stupendous background of the stellar universe, and to impart to readers the sentiment that of these contrasting magnitudes the smaller might be the greater to them as men.” Astronomy and science was of particular interest to Hardy and he was clearly knowledgeable in this area as this novel demonstrates.. The two on the Tower are Lady Viviette Constantine and Swithin St Cleeve. The former is the wife of a wealthy land owner whose husband is away in Africa and the latter a young keen astronomer who has been using the Tower, on her land, to observe the night sky. The two fall in love and their ensuing relationship allows Hardy to explore love across class and age divide fully with many compelling twists and turns.
The Trumpet Major by
A romantic story from Thomas Hardy set in the Napoleionic wars. Anne Garland is courted by three suiters: John Loveday (the Trumpet-Major of the title), his brother Robert and Festus Derriman, the son of a squire. The full title of the book is: The Trumpet-Major John Loveday, a Soldier in the War with Buonaparte, and Robert His Brother, First Mate in the Merchant Service.
Two on a Tower by
Best known for works such as Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far From the Madding Crowd, British novelist Thomas Hardy also focused extensively on works of fantasy and speculative history. Two on a Tower is an imaginative work that spins the tale of a romance set in the Victorian era.
The Woodlanders by
If ever I forget your name let me forget home and heaven...But no, no, my love, I never can forget'ee; for you was a good man, and did good things!'Love, and the erratic heart, are at the centre of Hardy's'woodland story'. Set in the beautiful Blackmoor Vale, The Woodlanders concerns the fortunes of Giles Winterborne, whose love for the well-to-do Grace Melbury is challenged by the arrival of the dashing and dissolute doctor, Edred Fitzpiers. When the mysterious Felice Charmond further complicates the romantic entanglements, marital choice and class mobility become inextricably linked. Hardy's powerful novel depicts individuals in thrall to desire and the natural law that motivates them. This is the only critical edition of The Woodlanders based on a comprehensive study of the manuscript and incorporating later revisions
