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  1. Home
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  3. Reading Thomas Hardy
  • Cited by 5
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
June 2017
Print publication year:
2017
Online ISBN:
9781316823293
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316823293
Subjects:
Literature, English Literature: General Interest, English Literature 1830-1900, English Literature 1900-1945
Series:
Reading Writers and their Work
Information

Book description

This major new reading of the novels of Thomas Hardy, by leading critic George Levine, disentangles the author's often elaborately distanced prose from his beautiful poetic and precise renderings of the natural world. Clear, direct and minimally academic in his own writing, Levine provides an overview of Hardy's entire fictional canon, with extensive discussions of his early and late novels including his last, The Well-Beloved. Levine draws new attention to the way Hardy absorbed both the ideas and the writing strategies of Charles Darwin, and develops new perspectives first articulated in the criticism of great novelists - in particular Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Levine departs from the critical norm by reading Hardy in the context of his deep feeling for the natural world and all living things, and the implicit affirmation of life that sometimes drives his bleakest narratives.

Reviews

'A wide range of readers will be attracted by the accessible style, moderate length, and reasonable price of Reading Thomas Hardy. Those less familiar with Hardy criticism will benefit from Levine’s adept summaries of some of the major areas of debate, which cover questions of realism, style, respectability, narrative position, and observation. But, above all, this book will bring into critical view a more dynamic understanding of Hardy - a writer whose attentiveness to the natural world re-enchants his readers.'

Jonathan Godshaw Memel Source: Modern Language Review

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Contents

Contents
References

Suggestions for Further Reading

Bayley, John, An Essay on Hardy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
Björk, A. Lennart, ed., The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1985).
Boumelha, Penny, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982).
Bullen, J. B., The Expressive Eye: Fiction and Perception in the Work of Thomas Hardy (Oxford: Clarendon University Press, 1986).
Butler, Lance St. John, ed., Alternative Hardy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989).
Cox, R. G., ed., Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1970).
Ebbatson, Roger, Hardy: The Margin of the Unexpressed (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993).
Garson, Marjorie, Hardy’s Fables of Integrity: Woman, Body, Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
Gatrell, Simon, Hardy the Creator: A Textual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon University Press, 1988).
Goode, John, Thomas Hardy: The Offensive Truth (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).
Gregor, Ian, The Great Web: The Form of Hardy’s Major Fiction (London: Faber and Faber, 1974).
Hardy, Emma, Some Recollections, ed. Hardy, Emma and Gittings, Robert (London: Oxford University Press, 1961).
Howe, Irving, Thomas Hardy (New York: Collier, 1973).
Kramer, Dale, ed., Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan Press, 1979).
Lawrence, D. H., “A Study of Thomas Hardy,” in McDonald, Edward D., ed., Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence (London: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 398–516.
Mallett, Philip, ed., Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).
Meisel, Perry, Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Repressed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972).
Miller, J. Hillis, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).
Millgate, Michael, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Morgan, Rosemarie, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (London: Routledge, 1988).
Orel, Harold, ed., Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings: Prefaces, Literary Opinions, Reminiscences (London: Macmillan, 1966).
Purdy, Richard Liddle and Millgate, Michael, eds., The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987–1988).
Taylor, H. Richard, ed., The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1979).
Wilson, Keith, ed., A Companion to Thomas Hardy (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
Wilson, Keith, ed., Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).
Widdowson, Peter, Hardy in History: A Study in Literary Sociology (New York: Routledge, 1989).
Widdowson, Peter, On Thomas Hardy: Late Essays and Earlier (London: Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1998).
Woolf, Virginia, “Thomas Hardy,” in The Second Common Reader (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1960 [1932]), pp. 222–234.

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