Hardy was a ghost-ridden author. He described himself as a 'ghost-seer', and in his poetry he constantly writes about the spritis of the dead, whether people known to him, imagined ghosts, or the more abstract spirits who might appear before the bar of history for judgement. This study argues that the idea of haunting is central to his work: in his conception of his 'second' career as a poet; in the phantom of the lost child which permeates his writings (and reproduces itself in the accusation that he fathered a bastard child with his cousin); in his elegiac writings and intertextual references; and with the way he thinks about history, language and consciousness. Using the work of Derrida, Abraham and Torok, Walter Benjamin and other theorists, and referring to Victorian debates on materialism and histiography, Tim Armstrong investigates ghostliness, historicity, the event and the status of memory in Hardy's poems.

'Haunted Hardy is a product of much solid scholarship...a welcome addition to...the discussion of Hardy's poetry.' - English Language Teaching

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
Supplementarity
The Ghosts of Thought
The Child in Time
The Politics of the Dead
History, Catastrophe, Typology
Mourning and Intertextuality
Notes
Index

TIM ARMSTRONG is Reader in Modern English and American Literature at Royal Holloway University of London. He is the author of Modernism, Technology and the Body (1998), has edited Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems (1993), American Bodies (1996) and co-edited Beyond the Pleasure Dome: Writing and Addiction from the Romantics (1994).