For more than thirty years, books and essays on Thomas Hardy have been at the forefront of developments in academic literary studies. This collection presents exciting new readings of Hardy's work which also reflect on continuities and changes in recent critical practice. It brings together essays by some of the leading figures in the turn to theory in the 1970s and 80s and essays by distinguished and emerging critics and cultural theorists working in the profoundly changed institutional conditions of the 1990s and 2000s.
Offering new perspectives on a range of topics and approaches, Thomas Hardy and Contemporary Literary Studies shows how Hardy's writing continues to provoke its readers to re-examine important issues in literary criticism and critical and cultural theory. The collection includes contributions from Terry Eagleton, J Hillis Miller, Tim Armstrong, Mary Rimmer, Linda M. Shires, Guy Davidson, Simon During, Brett Neilson, Roger Ebbatson, Michael Hollington.
'The excellence of this collection lies in its achieving its two central aims: to provide 'theoretical demonstrations' - examples or models of reading Hardy's stories and poems in light of a variety of critical theories - and, while doing so, to analyze important characteristic features of the stories and poems. The result is a series of always lucid, frequently brilliant, essays by well-known English, Australian, and American writers. While adopting famous theoretical concepts with a skill that will allow students to see the grounds for their approaches, the authors bring to bear on Hardy remarkable insight and originality that will reward the professional reader and enthusiast.' - Dale Kramer, Professor of English Emeritus, University of Illinois
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
A Note on Texts Used
Introduction: Hardy and Literary Studies at the Turn of the Century; T.Dolin & P.Widdowson
Flesh and Spirit in Thomas Hardy; T.Eagleton
Hardy and the Limits of Culturalism; G.Davidson
Speech Acts, Decisions, and Community in The Mayor of Casterbridge; J.Hillis Miller
Hardy or James? Thoughts on Academic Literary Discrimination Today; S.During
Hardy, Barbarism and the Transformations of Modernity; B.Neilson
A Laodicean: Hardy and the Philosophy of Money; R.Ebbatson
Story, History, Allegory: Some Ironies of Jude the Obscure from a Benjamin Perspective; M.Hollington
The Contemporary, the All: Liberal Politics and the Origins of Wessex; T.Dolin
'Saying that now you are not as you were': Hardy's 'Poems of 1912-13'; L.M.Shires
Hardy, History and Recorded Music; T.Armstrong
Hardy and Contemporary Textual Studies: Authorial Intention in The Trumpet-Major; M.Rimmer
Thomas Hardy at the End of Two Centuries: From Page to Screen; P.Widdowson
Works Cited
Index
TIM DOLIN is Research Fellow in the Australia Research Institute at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia. He is the author of books and articles on Victorian fiction, and has edited three of Hardy's novels for Penguin and recently completed George Eliot for Oxford University Press.
PETER WIDDOWSON is Professor and Reader in Literature at the University of Gloucestershire. He has published widely on literary theory, literature and history, and nineteenth-and twentieth-century British fiction, with a particular focus on Thomas Hardy. He has recently completed Contexts and Chronologies, 1500-1999, a historical guide to English Literature largely based on time-line tables also for Palgrave Macmillan, and is currently writing the volume on Graham Swift for the Writers and Their Work series.
Description
For more than thirty years, books and essays on Thomas Hardy have been at the forefront of developments in academic literary studies. This collection presents exciting new readings of Hardy's work which also reflect on continuities and changes in recent critical practice. It brings together essays by some of the leading figures in the turn to theory in the 1970s and 80s and essays by distinguished and emerging critics and cultural theorists working in the profoundly changed institutional conditions of the 1990s and 2000s.
Offering new perspectives on a range of topics and approaches, Thomas Hardy and Contemporary Literary Studies shows how Hardy's writing continues to provoke its readers to re-examine important issues in literary criticism and critical and cultural theory. The collection includes contributions from Terry Eagleton, J Hillis Miller, Tim Armstrong, Mary Rimmer, Linda M. Shires, Guy Davidson, Simon During, Brett Neilson, Roger Ebbatson, Michael Hollington.
Reviews
'The excellence of this collection lies in its achieving its two central aims: to provide 'theoretical demonstrations' - examples or models of reading Hardy's stories and poems in light of a variety of critical theories - and, while doing so, to analyze important characteristic features of the stories and poems. The result is a series of always lucid, frequently brilliant, essays by well-known English, Australian, and American writers. While adopting famous theoretical concepts with a skill that will allow students to see the grounds for their approaches, the authors bring to bear on Hardy remarkable insight and originality that will reward the professional reader and enthusiast.' - Dale Kramer, Professor of English Emeritus, University of Illinois
Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
A Note on Texts Used
Introduction: Hardy and Literary Studies at the Turn of the Century; T.Dolin & P.Widdowson
Flesh and Spirit in Thomas Hardy; T.Eagleton
Hardy and the Limits of Culturalism; G.Davidson
Speech Acts, Decisions, and Community in The Mayor of Casterbridge; J.Hillis Miller
Hardy or James? Thoughts on Academic Literary Discrimination Today; S.During
Hardy, Barbarism and the Transformations of Modernity; B.Neilson
A Laodicean: Hardy and the Philosophy of Money; R.Ebbatson
Story, History, Allegory: Some Ironies of Jude the Obscure from a Benjamin Perspective; M.Hollington
The Contemporary, the All: Liberal Politics and the Origins of Wessex; T.Dolin
'Saying that now you are not as you were': Hardy's 'Poems of 1912-13'; L.M.Shires
Hardy, History and Recorded Music; T.Armstrong
Hardy and Contemporary Textual Studies: Authorial Intention in The Trumpet-Major; M.Rimmer
Thomas Hardy at the End of Two Centuries: From Page to Screen; P.Widdowson
Works Cited
Index
Authors
TIM DOLIN is Research Fellow in the Australia Research Institute at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia. He is the author of books and articles on Victorian fiction, and has edited three of Hardy's novels for Penguin and recently completed George Eliot for Oxford University Press.
PETER WIDDOWSON is Professor and Reader in Literature at the University of Gloucestershire. He has published widely on literary theory, literature and history, and nineteenth-and twentieth-century British fiction, with a particular focus on Thomas Hardy. He has recently completed Contexts and Chronologies, 1500-1999, a historical guide to English Literature largely based on time-line tables also for Palgrave Macmillan, and is currently writing the volume on Graham Swift for the Writers and Their Work series.
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