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Thomas Hardy: The Novels (Analysing Texts)
by Norman PageThis book is designed to serve as a practical guide for students and others wishing to improve their skills in the detailed analysis and discussion of Hardy's prose texts. Its aim is to sharpen readers' awareness of the complexity and subtlety of Hardy's art by encouraging responsiveness to such aspects as language and style, imagery and symbol, descriptive and dramatic method and narrative technique. At the same time extracts are considered not in isolation but in relation to the overall purposes of a highly-organised text.While the main focus is on four of Hardy's most-widely read novels, the twenty-four examples of close analysis cover six major themes that are relevant to all his fiction. There are also numerous references to his other writings in prose and verse. The second part of the book provides, in succinct form, essential background material, including an outline of Hardy's life and career and an account of the literary, historical and intellectual contexts of his fiction. As well as a guide to further reading, a chapter is devoted to samples of criticism illustrating a range of approaches to the chosen texts and representing the work of important critics past and present.
Thomas Hardy: The Novels (Analysing Texts)
by Norman PageThis book is designed to serve as a practical guide for students and others wishing to improve their skills in the detailed analysis and discussion of Hardy's prose texts. Its aim is to sharpen readers' awareness of the complexity and subtlety of Hardy's art by encouraging responsiveness to such aspects as language and style, imagery and symbol, descriptive and dramatic method and narrative technique. At the same time extracts are considered not in isolation but in relation to the overall purposes of a highly-organised text.While the main focus is on four of Hardy's most-widely read novels, the twenty-four examples of close analysis cover six major themes that are relevant to all his fiction. There are also numerous references to his other writings in prose and verse. The second part of the book provides, in succinct form, essential background material, including an outline of Hardy's life and career and an account of the literary, historical and intellectual contexts of his fiction. As well as a guide to further reading, a chapter is devoted to samples of criticism illustrating a range of approaches to the chosen texts and representing the work of important critics past and present.
Thomas Hardy on Stage
by K. Wilson'Meticulously researched and lucidly written, this volume will likely become and remain the definitive study of the history of works Hardy adapted for the stage and of the Hardy Players who, in the main, performed them.' - John J. Conlon, English Literature in Transition 'Much new research informs this first full-length study of Hardy's involvement in stage productions based on his own works. The result is a closely reasoned account of the conflict between his desire to see his plots and characters brought to the stage, and his awareness of the attending difficulties.' - M.S. Vogeler, Choice Despite Hardy's lifelong interest in the theatre, this is the first comprehensive study of all aspects of his involvement with the stage, the only area of his literary activities left substantially unexplored. It discusses his own experiments at crafting scenarios and plays, all productions, both amateur and professional, with which he had any involvement, and his troubled negotiations with adapters, producers, and actors. It is fascinating for what it reveals about both the artist and the man, and offers particular insight into the paradoxical connections between the retiring Dorchester celebrity and the international man of letters.
Thomas Hardy: The Poems (Analysing Texts)
by Gillian SteinbergGillian Steinberg offers an approachable introduction to the poems of one of the most prolific and influential English writers, through an examination of wide-ranging selections from his work.Part I of this invaluable study:• provides clear and stimulating close readings of Thomas Hardy's key poems• considers major themes in Hardy's poetry, including ghosts, God's role in the world, war, and the painful passage of time• summarizes the methods of analysis and provides suggestions for further work.Part II supplies essential background material, featuring:• an account of Hardy's life and works• samples of criticism from important Hardy scholars.With a helpful Further Reading section, this insightful volume is ideal for anyone who wishes to appreciate and explore Hardy's poetry for themselves.
Thomas Hardy: The Poems (Analysing Texts)
by Gillian SteinbergGillian Steinberg offers an approachable introduction to the poems of one of the most prolific and influential English writers, through an examination of wide-ranging selections from his work.Part I of this invaluable study:- Provides clear and stimulating close readings of Thomas Hardy's key poems- Considers major themes in Hardy's poetry, including ghosts, God's role in the world, war, and the painful passage of time- Summarizes the methods of analysis and provides suggestions for further workPart II supplies essential background material, featuring:- An account of Hardy's life and works- Samples of criticism from important Hardy scholarsWith a helpful Further Reading section, this insightful volume is ideal for anyone who wishes to appreciate and explore Hardy's poetry for themselves.
Thomas Hardy Remembered (The Nineteenth Century Series)
by Martin RayThomas Hardy Remembered assembles some 150 annotated interviews and recollections of Hardy, most of which are being reprinted for the first time. They range from close personal reflections by old friends such as Sir George Douglas, J.M. Barrie, and Edmund Gosse, to fleeting glimpses by strangers who saw Hardy at a London party or at his club. Martin Ray has selected items having the greatest literary or biographical significance, and annotated them with meticulous accuracy and a keen eye for the telling detail. As a result, the volume will be an invaluable resource to scholars who are interested not only in what concerned Hardy personally and professionally, but also in how he was perceived by others. Having these items collected in one volume reveals Hardy's contemporaneous opinions about his own writings and also makes it possible to trace the marked recurrence, over time, of certain preoccupations: ancient families, Hardy's hostility to reviewers, architecture, Roman relics, Wessex folklore and dialect, animal welfare, Napoleon, and hangings. With regard to his literary career, a portrait emerges of Hardy as the scrupulous professional, properly aware of his commercial rights, while at the same time appearing, to some who met him, unconscious of his own genius.
Thomas Hardy Remembered (The Nineteenth Century Series)
by Martin RayThomas Hardy Remembered assembles some 150 annotated interviews and recollections of Hardy, most of which are being reprinted for the first time. They range from close personal reflections by old friends such as Sir George Douglas, J.M. Barrie, and Edmund Gosse, to fleeting glimpses by strangers who saw Hardy at a London party or at his club. Martin Ray has selected items having the greatest literary or biographical significance, and annotated them with meticulous accuracy and a keen eye for the telling detail. As a result, the volume will be an invaluable resource to scholars who are interested not only in what concerned Hardy personally and professionally, but also in how he was perceived by others. Having these items collected in one volume reveals Hardy's contemporaneous opinions about his own writings and also makes it possible to trace the marked recurrence, over time, of certain preoccupations: ancient families, Hardy's hostility to reviewers, architecture, Roman relics, Wessex folklore and dialect, animal welfare, Napoleon, and hangings. With regard to his literary career, a portrait emerges of Hardy as the scrupulous professional, properly aware of his commercial rights, while at the same time appearing, to some who met him, unconscious of his own genius.
Thomas Hardy, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode
by R. NemesvariThe first full-length study of sensationalist and melodramatic elements in Hardy's novels uses six of his texts to demonstrate the ways in which Hardy uses the melodramatic mode to advance his critique of established Victorian cultural beliefs through the employment of non-realistic plot devices and sensational 'excess.'
Thomas Hardy, Time and Narrative: A Narratological Approach to his Novels
by K. IrelandHow is Hardy's development of thematics and characters matched by that of narrative techniques and his handling of time? This book uses narratological methods to stress the interdependence of content and expression in a key transitional writer between the Victorian and Modernist eras.
Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Prose and Poetry: Codes of Bereavement
by Galia BenzimanThis book examines the transition from traditional to modern elegy through a close study of Thomas Hardy’s oeuvre and its commitment to mourning and remembrance. Hardy is usually read as an avowed elegist who writes against the collective forgetfulness typical of the late-Victorian era. But Hardy, as argued here, is dialectically implicated in the very cultural and psychological amnesia that he resists, as her book demonstrates by expanding the corpus of study beyond the spousal elegies (the “Poems of 1912-1913”) to include a wide variety of poems, novels and short stories that deal with bereavement and mourning. Locating the modern aspect of Hardy’s elegiac writing in this ambivalence and in the subversion of memory as unreliable, the book explores the textual moments at which Hardy challenges binary dichotomies such as forgetting vs. remembering, narcissism vs. unselfish commitment, grief vs. betrayal, the work of mourning vs. melancholia, presence vs. absence. The book's analysis allows us to relate Hardy’s elegiac poetics, and particularly his description of the mourner as a writer, to shifting late-Victorian conceptualizations of death, memory, art, science and gender relations.
Thomas Hardy’s ‘Facts’ Notebook: A Critical Edition (The Nineteenth Century Series)
by William GreensladeWithin weeks of Thomas Hardy’s return to his native Dorchester in June 1883, he began to compile his ’Facts’ notebook, which he kept up throughout the years when he was writing some of his major work - The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. From his intensive study of the Dorset County Chronicle for 1826-1830, he noted and summarised into 'Facts' (with the help of his first wife, Emma) hundreds of reports, many of them suggestive 'satires of circumstance', for possible use in his fiction and poems. Along with extensive reading in memoirs and local histories, this immersion in the files of the old newspaper involved him in a wider experience - the recovery and recognition of the unstable culture of the local past in the post-Napoleonic war years before his birth in 1840, and before the impact of the modernising of the Victorian era. 'Facts' is thus a unique document amongst Hardy's private writings and is here for the first time edited, the text transcribed in 'typographical facsimile' form, together with substantial annotation of the entries and critical and textual introductions.
Thomas Hardy’s ‘Facts’ Notebook: A Critical Edition (The Nineteenth Century Series)
by William GreensladeWithin weeks of Thomas Hardy’s return to his native Dorchester in June 1883, he began to compile his ’Facts’ notebook, which he kept up throughout the years when he was writing some of his major work - The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. From his intensive study of the Dorset County Chronicle for 1826-1830, he noted and summarised into 'Facts' (with the help of his first wife, Emma) hundreds of reports, many of them suggestive 'satires of circumstance', for possible use in his fiction and poems. Along with extensive reading in memoirs and local histories, this immersion in the files of the old newspaper involved him in a wider experience - the recovery and recognition of the unstable culture of the local past in the post-Napoleonic war years before his birth in 1840, and before the impact of the modernising of the Victorian era. 'Facts' is thus a unique document amongst Hardy's private writings and is here for the first time edited, the text transcribed in 'typographical facsimile' form, together with substantial annotation of the entries and critical and textual introductions.
Thomas Hardy's Novel Universe: Astronomy, Cosmology, and Gender in the Post-Darwinian World (The Nineteenth Century Series)
by Pamela GossinIn this, the first book-length study of astronomy in Hardy's writing, historian of science and literary scholar Pamela Gossin brings the analytical tools of both disciplines to bear as she offers unexpected and sophisticated readings of seven novels that enrich Darwinian and feminist perspectives on his work, extend formalist evaluations of his achievement as a writer, and provide fresh interpretations of enigmatic passages and scenes. In an elegantly crafted introduction, Gossin draws together the shared critical values and methods of literary studies and the history of science to articulate a hybrid model of scholarly interpretation and analysis that promotes cross-disciplinary compassion and understanding within the current contention of the science/culture wars. She then situates Hardy's own deeply interdisciplinary knowledge of astronomy and cosmology within both literary and scientific traditions, from the ancient world through the Victorian era. Gossin offers insightful new assessments of A Pair of Blue Eyes, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, Two on a Tower, The Woodlanders, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure, arguing that Hardy's personal synthesis of ancient and modern astronomy with mythopoetic and scientific cosmologies enabled him to write as a literary cosmologist for the post-Darwinian world. The profound new myths that comprise Hardy's novel universe can be read as a sustained set of literary thought-experiments by which he critiques the possibilities, limitations, and dangers of living out the storylines that such imaginative cosmologies project for his time - and ours.
Thomas Hardy's Novel Universe: Astronomy, Cosmology, and Gender in the Post-Darwinian World (The Nineteenth Century Series)
by Pamela GossinIn this, the first book-length study of astronomy in Hardy's writing, historian of science and literary scholar Pamela Gossin brings the analytical tools of both disciplines to bear as she offers unexpected and sophisticated readings of seven novels that enrich Darwinian and feminist perspectives on his work, extend formalist evaluations of his achievement as a writer, and provide fresh interpretations of enigmatic passages and scenes. In an elegantly crafted introduction, Gossin draws together the shared critical values and methods of literary studies and the history of science to articulate a hybrid model of scholarly interpretation and analysis that promotes cross-disciplinary compassion and understanding within the current contention of the science/culture wars. She then situates Hardy's own deeply interdisciplinary knowledge of astronomy and cosmology within both literary and scientific traditions, from the ancient world through the Victorian era. Gossin offers insightful new assessments of A Pair of Blue Eyes, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, Two on a Tower, The Woodlanders, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure, arguing that Hardy's personal synthesis of ancient and modern astronomy with mythopoetic and scientific cosmologies enabled him to write as a literary cosmologist for the post-Darwinian world. The profound new myths that comprise Hardy's novel universe can be read as a sustained set of literary thought-experiments by which he critiques the possibilities, limitations, and dangers of living out the storylines that such imaginative cosmologies project for his time - and ours.
Thomas Hardy's Pastoral: An Unkindly May
by Indy ClarkThis book reads Hardy's poetry of the rural as deeply rooted in the historical tradition of the pastoral mode even as it complicates and extends it. It shows that in addition to reinstating the original tensions of classical pastoral, Hardy dramatizes a heightened awareness of complex communities and the relations of class, labour, and gender.
Thomas Hardy's Personal Writings
by Harold Orel'... Thomas Hardy's Personal Writings is an informative book, and a superlatively well-edited one. Professor Orel has been generous in his inclusions, meticulous in his texts, and thorough in his annotations. Anything that one is likely to want to read of Hardy's occasional prose is here, and what is not here is carefully described in an annotated appendix. The book takes it place at once with Richard Purdy's bibliography as a standard, useful, trustworthy work in the library of essential Hardy scholarship.' Times Literary Supplement '... these essays certainly deserve to be much better known.' Raymond Williams, Guardian
Thomas Hardy's Short Stories: New Perspectives (The Nineteenth Century Series)
by Juliette Berning Schaefer Siobhan Craft BrownsonThomas Hardy penned nearly fifty short stories, but in spite of this impressive number, his contributions to the genre have been relatively understudied. Bringing together an international group of scholars, this is the first edited collection devoted solely to Hardy's works of short fiction. The contributors take up topics related to their publication in periodicals, gender and community relationships, and narrative techniques. Taken together, the essays show that Hardy's short stories are important, not only for what they tell us about Hardy as a writer who straddles the divide between the traditionalist and the modernist, but also for how they reflect and inform the period in which he wrote.
Thomas Hardy's Short Stories: New Perspectives (The Nineteenth Century Series)
by Juliette Berning Schaefer Siobhan Craft BrownsonThomas Hardy penned nearly fifty short stories, but in spite of this impressive number, his contributions to the genre have been relatively understudied. Bringing together an international group of scholars, this is the first edited collection devoted solely to Hardy's works of short fiction. The contributors take up topics related to their publication in periodicals, gender and community relationships, and narrative techniques. Taken together, the essays show that Hardy's short stories are important, not only for what they tell us about Hardy as a writer who straddles the divide between the traditionalist and the modernist, but also for how they reflect and inform the period in which he wrote.
Thomas Hardy’s Vision of Wessex
by S. GatrellWessex did not spring full-born from Hardy's imagination when he began to write. The first part of the book reveals in detail how Wessex became what it is, geographically, socially and culturally, beginning with his fist poem in the 1860s and ending with Winter Words, his last collection of verse. The second (briefer) part is an account of the impact of Hardy's vision of Wessex on twentieth-century English culture, offering an explanation for Hardy's endurance as a popular novelist.
Thomas Heywood and the classical tradition
by Tania Demetriou Janice Valls-RussellThis volume offers the first in-depth investigation of Thomas Heywood’s engagement with the classics. Its introduction and twelve essays trace how the classics shaped Heywood’s work in a variety of genres across a writing career of over forty years, ranging from drama, epic and epyllion, to translations, compendia and the design of a warship for Charles I. Close readings demonstrate the influence of a capaciously conceived classical tradition that included continental editions and translations of Latin and Greek texts, early modern mythographies and the medieval tradition of Troy. They attend to Heywood’s thought-provoking imitations and juxtapositions of these sources, his use of myth to interrogate gender and heroism, and his turn to antiquity to celebrate and defamiliarise the theatrical or political present. Heywood’s better-known works are discussed alongside critically neglected ones, making the collection valuable for undergraduates and researchers alike.
Thomas Heywood and the classical tradition
by Tania Demetriou and Janice Valls-RussellThis volume offers the first in-depth investigation of Thomas Heywood’s engagement with the classics. Its introduction and twelve essays trace how the classics shaped Heywood’s work in a variety of genres across a writing career of over forty years, ranging from drama, epic and epyllion, to translations, compendia and the design of a warship for Charles I. Close readings demonstrate the influence of a capaciously conceived classical tradition that included continental editions and translations of Latin and Greek texts, early modern mythographies and the medieval tradition of Troy. They attend to Heywood’s thought-provoking imitations and juxtapositions of these sources, his use of myth to interrogate gender and heroism, and his turn to antiquity to celebrate and defamiliarise the theatrical or political present. Heywood’s better-known works are discussed alongside critically neglected ones, making the collection valuable for undergraduates and researchers alike.
Thomas Heywood's Pageants (Routledge Revivals)
by Thomas HeywoodPublished in 1986: This book is about the shows which were put on during the inauguration of new Mayors of London. Such pageants were processions through the city of London with tableaux vivants; some of the shows also included dramatic entertainment on the Thames.