This book proposes that a Hardy novel should be read very much as a Constable painting is 'read' - the landscape as significant as the figures who traverse it, the background as important as the story. It analyses the recurring emphases and implications in Hardy's innumerable descriptions of birds, plants, insects, light, weather, sound, movement. The ephemeral lives of his human protagonists are seen to be half dissolved in the ceaseless patterns of motion, change and dissolution in the teeming world they inhabit. Hardy emerges as no mere story-teller, in the nineteenth-century tradition, but as a poet and a modernist who dramatizes a vision, a way of seeing and understanding the world. So far from being - as has often been claimed - an unsophisticated writer, he is a supremely coherent artist whose work everywhere shows the shaping power of his idiosyncratic habit of imagination.
'...an eloquent, heartfelt appreciation of Thomas Hardy by a critic intimately familiar with the whole Hardy corpus.' - English Language Teaching
List of Illustrations
Preface
Reference and Abbreviations
Introduction
Hardy's Insects
Noises in Hardy's Novels
The Poetry of Motion
Erosion, Deformation and Reformation
Concatenations
'This Insubstantial Pageant'
Notes
Index
MICHAEL IRWIN is Professor of English at the University of Kent, which he first joined as lecturer in 1967. He had previously worked at the Catholic University of Lublin, at the University of Tokyo, at the University of Lódz and at Smith College. His chief academic interest has been in fiction, and particularly in matters of fictional technique. His work in this area includes Henry Fielding: the Tentative Realist and Picturing: Description and Illusion in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. For many years he has taught at Kent a specialized course on the work of Thomas Hardy. He has published two novels, Working Orders and Striker, and has translated numerous opera libretti - usually for Kent Opera in the first instance - and a variety of lieder and cabaret songs.
Description
This book proposes that a Hardy novel should be read very much as a Constable painting is 'read' - the landscape as significant as the figures who traverse it, the background as important as the story. It analyses the recurring emphases and implications in Hardy's innumerable descriptions of birds, plants, insects, light, weather, sound, movement. The ephemeral lives of his human protagonists are seen to be half dissolved in the ceaseless patterns of motion, change and dissolution in the teeming world they inhabit. Hardy emerges as no mere story-teller, in the nineteenth-century tradition, but as a poet and a modernist who dramatizes a vision, a way of seeing and understanding the world. So far from being - as has often been claimed - an unsophisticated writer, he is a supremely coherent artist whose work everywhere shows the shaping power of his idiosyncratic habit of imagination.
Reviews
'...an eloquent, heartfelt appreciation of Thomas Hardy by a critic intimately familiar with the whole Hardy corpus.' - English Language Teaching
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Reference and Abbreviations
Introduction
Hardy's Insects
Noises in Hardy's Novels
The Poetry of Motion
Erosion, Deformation and Reformation
Concatenations
'This Insubstantial Pageant'
Notes
Index
Authors
MICHAEL IRWIN is Professor of English at the University of Kent, which he first joined as lecturer in 1967. He had previously worked at the Catholic University of Lublin, at the University of Tokyo, at the University of Lódz and at Smith College. His chief academic interest has been in fiction, and particularly in matters of fictional technique. His work in this area includes Henry Fielding: the Tentative Realist and Picturing: Description and Illusion in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. For many years he has taught at Kent a specialized course on the work of Thomas Hardy. He has published two novels, Working Orders and Striker, and has translated numerous opera libretti - usually for Kent Opera in the first instance - and a variety of lieder and cabaret songs.
terte
terte
|