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Cancelled Words: Rediscovering Thomas Hardy by
The manuscript of Hardy's first great novel Far From the Madding Crowd vanished shortly after its first publication. Rediscovered in 1918 it sheds remarkable new light on the whole of Hardy's work. The manuscript pages, some of which are reproduced here in facsimile, reveal Hardy's original composition in the novel, and the reluctantly cancelled words' which were the result of a long struggle with Sir Leslie Stephen, Hardy's editor. Cancelled Words reveals the manner in which Hardy worked, his resistance to censorship, his obsessive attention to detail and precision, and the often concealed processes underlying his authorship. Ultimately, it serves to shape our understanding of the development of the modern novel.
A Companion to Thomas Hardy by
Through original essays from a distinguished team of international scholars and Hardy specialists, A Companion to Thomas Hardy provides a unique, one-volume resource, which encompasses all aspects of Hardy's major novels, short stories, and poetry Informed by the latest in scholarly, critical, and theoretical debates from some of the world's leading Hardy scholars Reveals groundbreaking insights through examinations of Hardy's major novels, short stories, poetry, and drama Explores Hardy's work in the context of the major intellectual and socio-cultural currents of his time and assesses his legacy for subsequent writers
Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy by 
The Dream Life of Citizens: Late Victorian Novels and the Fantasy of the State by 
Expression of Things: Themes in Thomas Hardy's Fiction and Poetry by
John Hughes explores Hardys claim that his art sought to intensify the expression of things through three main sections on music, the body, and voice. These offer intersecting and mutually informing discussions of the central drama of inexpression and expressivity in Hardys work, as it affects the various personae of the text, including the reader. Throughout, the book draws on themes in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell to reveal how Hardys fiction and poetry express and represent the affective and physical conditions of mind, and their conflicts with social fictions of identity. The first main section on music incorporates three chapters that examine how Hardys 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. Intricate and extensive readings are linked also to 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 characterise Hardys work throughout his career. The second section -- on embodiment and sensation shows how close attention to Hardys 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 offers three chapters, each of which centrally employs a close metrical reading of an important Hardy poem within its larger biographical and inter-textual contexts. These readings demonstrate how fundamental were Hardys 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.
Green Man Hopkins: Poetry and the Victorian Ecological Imagination by 
Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, 1840-1928 by
One of the literary world's great deceptions was perpetrated when Thomas Hardy wrote his Life in secret for publication after his death as an official biography. Since the true circumstances of its composition have been known The Early Life and Later Years of Thomas Hardy, published over the name of Florence Emily Hardy, has frequently been referred to as Hardy's autobiography. But this is not the whole truth: Florence altered much of what Hardy meant to appear in his 'biography'. Through careful examination of pre- publication texts, Michael Millgate has retrieved the text as it stood at the time of Hardy's final revision. For the first time The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy can be read as a true work of autobiography - an addition to the Hardy canon.
The Life of Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography by
Turner's strikingly original and penetrating account of Hardy's extraordinarily creative life and longevity offers a series of thirty-two chapters, each of which relates the biographical and literary background of a single work.
The Madder Stain: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Thomas Hardy by
The "madder stain" imprinted on Tess d'Urberville's arm is part of a motif which runs through Hardy's fiction. Similar to Barthes's punctum shooting out of the studium, the stain is a place where the Real erupts, a blind spot that eludes interpretation. In the diegesis of the tragic novels, it is a surplus object whose intrusion disrupts reality and spells disaster. This book attempts to approach that unknowable kernel of jouissance by using Lacan's concepts of object-gaze and object-voice--sometimes revisited by Zizek. The stain has a vocal quality: it is silence audible. In a world where sound cannot reverberate for lack of a structural void, voice is by necessity muted, stuck in the throat. Hence the peculiar quality of Tess's voice, a silent feminine cry that has retained something of the lost vocal object. The sound of silence is what Hardy's poetic prose allows us to hear.
Oxford Reader's Companion to Hardy by
Under the editorial direction of Norman Page, more than 40 of the world's most prominent experts have been brought together to combine their insights and knowledge of all aspects of Thomas Hardy's life and work. In more than 300 alphabetically arranged entries, this superb reference work examines all the novels, collections of verse, autobiography, letters, essays, stories, and notebooks produced during Hardy's long career. It examines his family and friends, the places that were important to him, and the influences that shaped his works, and it looks at more scholarly topics, such as various critical approaches to his work, and the history of Hardy publishing. Fully cross-referenced, and with a chronology of Hardy's life, an index of his poems, lists of place-names and characters in his works, a glossary of dialect words and expressions, a subject index, and an extensive bibliography, this is a gold mine of information. Boasting sound scholarship, the convenient companion format, and many beautiful black-and-white illustrations, The Oxford Reader's Companion to Hardy is an indispensable volume for all lovers of modern English literature.
Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition by
Romantic Ecology reassesses the poetry of William Wordsworth in the context of the abiding pastoral tradition in English Literature. Jonathan Bate explores the politics of poetry and argues that contrary to critics who suggest that the Wordsworth was a reactionary who failed to represent the harsh economic reality of his native Lake District, the poet's politics were fundamentally 'green'. As our first truly ecological poet, Wordsworth articulated a powerful and enduring vision of human integration with nature which exercised a formative influence on later conservation movements and is of immediate relevance to great environmental issues today. Challenging the orthodoxies of new historicist criticism, Jonathan Bate sets a new agenda for the study of Romanticism in the 1990s.
Scott, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy: Great Shakespeareans: Volume V by
Great Shakespeareans offers a systematic account of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. In this volume, leading scholars assess the contribution of Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy to the afterlife and reception of Shakespeare and his plays. Each substantial contribution assesses the double impact of Shakespeare on the figure covered and of the figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, provide a sketch of their subject's intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider cultural context, including comparison with other figures or works within the same field.
The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy by 
Thomas Hardy by
Michael Millgate's classic biography of 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 Millgate, 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 will become the standard life of Hardy for a new generation.
Thomas Hardy by 
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's Legal Fictions by
Explores Thomas Hardy's engagement with Victorian legal debates in his prose fiction Thomas Hardy's fiction is examined in this book in the context of the seismic legal reforms of the nineteenth century as well as legal discourse in the literature of the era. The book examines the ways in which Hardy's role as a magistrate and his interest in the law impacted fundamentally on his prose fiction. It demonstrates that throughout his prose fiction Hardy engages with contentious legal issues that were debated by legal professionals and literary figures of his day, and argues that Hardy used fiction as a forum to question the extent to which legal reform improved the lives of women and the working classes. The study also looks at the ways in which Hardy deployed criminal plots derived from sensation fiction and reveals that the genre's engagement with legal reform influenced not only his sensation novel Desperate Remedies (1871) but also the plots of his subsequent fiction. Key Features Offers a reinterpretation of Thomas Hardy's work in the light of a detailed study of his legal interests and his use of contemporary legal cases and debates in his prose fiction Provides detailed textual analysis of a wide range of legal interests in Hardy's entire output of fiction Draws on the interdisciplinary study of Law and Literature Examines Hardy's fiction in the context of other Victorian literature concerned with legal issues, particularly sensation fiction
Thomas Hardy's the Woodlanders by
"The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him." 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 (Routledge Revivals) by
First published in 1977, this concise and insightful study of the life and works of Thomas Hardy provides a thorough examination of Hardy's literary output. Alongside a brief biography of Hardy's life, Professor Page's study also spotlights his major and minor novels, his short stories, his non-fiction prose and his verse.
Thomas Hardy, Monism, and the Carnival Tradition by
Using insights derived from the critical theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, Wickens counters the usual view of The Dynasts as failed epic or tragedy, and instead situates the work as a novel within the serio-comical genres.
Thomas Hardy: Imagining Imagination in Hardy's Poetry and Fiction by
The author of this text offers close readings of Thomas Hardy's poetry and novels, regarding these as expressive forms for the discovery of everyday and professional acts of imagination. The themes and forms examined here include narrative, conversation, gossip, memory, gender, poetry of place and imaginative threshold. Altogether the study is a contribution to theories of reflexivity, expanding and revising some of the analysis provided by Professor Hardy in The Appropriate Form and Tellers and Listeners.
Thomas Hardy: The "Dream-country" of His Fiction by
In this book, Anne Alexander examines the grounds for considering the 'dream-country' approach to Hardy's fiction. She shows how the 'dream-country' environment may suggest the awakening of unconscious thoughts and feelings and how Hardy uses this to suggest the extent to which these unconscious thoughts and feelings affect the behavior of individual characters as well as the relationships between men and women.
Thomas Hardy: The Forms of Tragedy by 
Thomas Hardy and the Comic Muse by
There has long been a tendency to regard Thomas Hardy as a great tragic writer and to ignore or underestimate the value of his comic works. This derives no doubt partly from the fact that comedy as an art form has been consistently undervalued ever since
Thomas Hardy and the Proper Study of Mankind by
Simon Gatrell offers a fresh and stimulating exploration of Hardy's account in fiction of the individual man or woman's relationship with various aspects of the encompassing world- with other men and women, with the aggregation known as society, with the natural and artificial environment, and with the supernatural. He focuses on the importance of community in Hardy's fiction, especially on the ability of rural villages and towns to withstand the stresses of industrialized agriculture and the national standardization of education and culture.
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.
Thomas Hardy Reappraised by
As a writer who achieved major eminence in both fiction and poetry and whose engagement with these genres encompassed the period of transition from Victorianism to Modernism, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) enjoys a unique position in English Literary History. Michael Millgate, University Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Toronto is widely recognized as the world's foremost Thomas Hardy scholar. His contributions to the study of Hardy over more than three decades include his recently 'revisited' biography, the seven volume edition of Hardy's collected letters, and the influential critical study Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist. In Thomas Hardy Reappraised, editor Keith Wilson pays tribute to Millgate's many contributions to Hardy studies by bringing together new work by fifteen of the world's most eminent Hardy scholars. These essays address questions of biblical and literary allusiveness, cultural, historical, and philosophical context, narrative and poetic theory and practice, as well as Hardy's place in the modern world and his influence on younger writers. Together, the contributors offer one of the most significant reappraisals of Hardy's work to have appeared since Michael Millgate helped to transform Hardy studies. They offer graphic testimony to Hardy's enduring popularity and importance. Contributors: Pamela Dalziel Mary Rimmer Dennis Taylor Barbara Hardy U.C. Knoepflmacher Marjorie Garson Ruth Bernard Yeazell Simon Gatrell J. Hillis Miller George Levine Jeremy V. Steele William W. Morgan Samuel Hynes Norman Page W. J. Keith
Walking by
If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again, - if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk. Walking is an essay by American writer, naturalist and philosopher David Thoreau (1817 - 1862). Thoreau's work has made a lasting contribution to modern environmental practice, and also influenced the non-violent resistance practiced by great civilians such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
