Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy PDF

Author: Claire Tomalin

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2007-01-18

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13: 1101201924

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"A masterful portrait" (The Philadelphia Inquirer) from a Whitbread Award-winning biographer, and author of A Life of My Own. The novels of Thomas Hardy have a permanent place on every booklover's shelf, yet little is known about the interior life of the man who wrote them. A believer and an unbeliever, a socialist and a snob, an unhappy husband and a desolate widower, Hardy challenged the sexual and religious conventions of his time in his novels and then abandoned fiction to reestablish himself as a great twentieth-century lyric poet. In this acclaimed new biography, Claire Tomalin, one of today's preeminent literary biographers, investigates this beloved writer and reveals a figure as rich and complex as his tremendous legacy.

Thomas Hardy's Shorter Fiction

Thomas Hardy's Shorter Fiction PDF

Author: Sophie Gilmartin

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2007-12-15

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 0748632557

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This critical study of Hardy's short stories provides a thorough account of the ruling preoccupations and recurrent writing strategies of his entire corpus as well as providing detailed readings of several individual texts. It relates the formal choices imposed on Hardy as contributor to Blackwood's Magazine and other periodicals to the methods he employed to encode in fiction his troubled attitude towards the social politics of the West Country, where most of the stories are set. No previous criticism has shown how the powerful challenges to the reader mounted in Hardy's later stories reveal the complexity of his motivations during a period when he was moving progressively in the direction of exchanging fiction for poetry. * Unique in providing a comprehensive criticism of Hardy's entire output of short stories. * Full, detailed, close readings of a number of key stories make this useful as a potential teaching resource. * Draws on the work of social historians to make clear the background of social and political unrest in Dorset that is partly uncovered and partly hidden in Hardy's portrayals of his fictional Wessex. * Offers fascinating insights into Hardy's near-obsession in his mature phase with the marriage contract, and with its legal binding of erratic men and women.

Thomas Hardy's Legal Fictions

Thomas Hardy's Legal Fictions PDF

Author: Trish Ferguson

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2013-08-20

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0748673253

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Explores Thomas Hardy's engagement with Victorian legal debates in his prose fiction. Thomas Hardy's fiction is examined in this book in the context of the seismic legal reforms of the nineteenth century as well as legal discourse in the literature of the era. The book examines the ways in which Hardy's role as a magistrate and his interest in the law impacted fundamentally on his prose fiction. It demonstrates that throughout his prose fiction Hardy engages with contentious legal issues that were debated by legal professionals and literary figures of his day, and argues that Hardy used fiction as a forum to question the extent to which legal reform improved the lives of women and the working classes.The study also looks at the ways in which Hardy deployed criminal plots derived from sensation fiction and reveals that the genre's engagement with legal reform influenced not only his sensation novel Desperate Remedies (1871) but also the plots of his subsequent fiction.

A Pair of Blue Eyes

A Pair of Blue Eyes PDF

Author: Thomas Hardy

Publisher: Standard Ebooks

Published: 2023-05-22T17:47:46Z

Total Pages: 467

ISBN-13:

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Young Elfride falls in love for the first time with an architect who is sent to make plans to renovate the local church. She supposes Stephen to be a professional man from London, but finds he comes from more humble origins. Stephen must go away and make something of himself before he can claim her. Circumstances change in his absence, and Elfride must decide if she will keep her pledge to marry Stephen. A Pair of Blue Eyes is Thomas Hardy’s third novel, and the first one to bear his real name when it was first published. The novel was first published as a serial, and the “cliffhanger” is supposed to have been named after a scene in which a character is left hanging over the edge of a cliff—while readers are left waiting for the next chapter to be serialized. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays

Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays PDF

Author: D. H. Lawrence

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1985-07-25

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 9780521252522

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D. H. Lawrence's 'Study of Thomas Hardy', written in the early months of World War I, was originally intended to be a short critical work on Hardy's characters, but developed into a major statement of Lawrence's philosophy of art. The introduction to this work shows its relation to Lawrence's final rewriting of The Rainbow and its place among his continual attempts to express his philosophy in a definitive form. Previously published posthumously from a corrupt typescript, the 'Study' is now more firmly based on Koteliansky's typescript - Lawrence having destroyed the manuscript. The other essays in this volume span virtually the whole of Lawrence's writing career, from 'Art and the Individual' (1908) to his last essay 'John Galsworthy', written in 1927. The introduction sets these essays in the context of Lawrence's life and work. The textual apparatus gives variant readings, and explanatory notes identify references and quotations, and offer background information.

Thomas Hardy's Novel Universe

Thomas Hardy's Novel Universe PDF

Author: Pamela Gossin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1351879251

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In 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.

Seeing Hardy

Seeing Hardy PDF

Author: Paul J. Niemeyer

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2015-10-05

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0786481358

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"Great authors" are increasingly being encountered by general audiences and critics thanks to films and television programs that have been adapted from their best-known works. Thomas Hardy is one of those authors. His work has inspired filmmakers from the silent age and modern times. This book is the first book-length study in what has become a growing field of interest in film adaptations of Hardy's novels. Part One of this book analyzes the popular image of Hardy and his work, the reproduction of this image in film adaptations, and critical stereotypes about him and his fiction. Part Two juxtaposes Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd and Schlesinger's adaptation, Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Polanski's adaptation, and Hardy's Jude the Obscure and Winterbottom's adaptation. Each discussion of the novel and adaptation in question considers the novel itself, the critical history of the novel, how it has been adapted to film, and how the individual filmmakers have struggled with problems inherent in Hardy's novels. Part Three analyzes adaptations of The Woodlanders, The Scarlet Tunic, and The Claim, all of which have scarcely been seen in the United States or which were not distributed in the United States, and four television movies and miniseries that were based on Hardy's work.