The Complete Critical Guide To Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was the foremost novelist of his time, as well as an established poet. This guide provides students with a lucid introduction to Hardy's life and works and the basis for a sound comprehension of his work.

This guide provides students with a lucid introduction to Hardy's life and works and the basis for a sound comprehension of his work. It includes 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. Both exposition and guide, this volume enables students to form their own readings of one of the most important writers of the nineteenth century.

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.

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Collected Critical Heritage set will be available as a set of 68 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) and as individual volumes.

Thomas Hardy was the foremost novelist of his time, as well as an established poet. This guide provides students with a lucid introduction to Hardy's life and works and the basis for a sound comprehension of his work.

Thomas Hardy made a reputation in more than one genre and in more than one period, and he has constantly given rise to widely differing critical responses. This study ranges in time from Hardy's response to Romanticism through to an examination of his diverse fortunes at the hands of critics from Hardy's own time to the present day. His achievement is examined through his various forms - his letters, autobiography, novels, poems and personal writings - and set in the context of the work of those whom he knew or admired. Timothy Hands surveys Hardy's ideas, his views on society and his remarkable knowledge of the contemporary arts. The book offers to specialist, student and general reader alike an authoritative yet readable guide through the biographical, literary and critical mazes surrounding Hardy's life and work.

In The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy, some of the most prominent Hardy specialists working today offer an overview of Hardy scholarship and suggest new directions in Hardy studies. The contributors cover virtually every area relevant to Hardy's fiction and poetry, including philosophy, palaeontology, biography, science, film, popular culture, beliefs, gender, music, masculinity, tragedy, topography, psychology, metaphysics, illustration, bibliographical studies and contemporary response. While several collections have surveyed the Hardy landscape, no previous volume has been composed especially for scholars and advanced graduate students. This companion is specially designed to aid original research on Hardy and serve as the critical basis for Hardy studies in the new millennium. Among the features are a comprehensive bibliography that includes not only works in English but, in acknowledgment of Hardy's explosion in popularity around the world, also works in languages other than English.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Thomas Hardy is not generally recognized as an imperial writer, even though he wrote during a period of major expansion of the British Empire and in spite of the many allusions to the Roman Empire and Napoleonic Wars in his writing. Jane L. Bownas examines the context of these references, proposing that Hardy was a writer who not only posed a challenge to the whole of established society, but one whose writings bring into question the very notion of empire. Bownas argues that Hardy takes up ideas of the primitive and civilized that were central to Western thought in the nineteenth century, contesting this opposition and highlighting the effect outsiders have on so-called 'primitive' communities. In her discussion of the oppressions of imperialism, she analyzes the debate surrounding the use of gender as an articulated category, together with race and class, and shows how, in exposing the power structures operating within Britain, Hardy produces a critique of all forms of ideological oppression.