Author: Hillel Matthew Daleski
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 9780826211255
Category : Love in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 492
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Book Description
Emphasizing the vast changes in literary criticism that have occurred during the last thirty years, H. M. Daleski reexamines Thomas Hardy's novels in the novelist's own terms, presenting a revisionary account of his treatment of gender. He also shows that Hardy was not as sexist as is asserted in much feminist criticism and that his female characters are sympathetically portrayed as the centers of his fictional worlds. By carefully analyzing the novels, Daleski refutes the generally accepted reason for Hardy's abandonment of fiction at the height of his powers, claiming that he drove himself to a dead end in Jude the Obscure. The typical Hardy plot places a female protagonist in a love triangle with two male protagonists who are portrayed as polar opposites. The woman contradicting a general view of her as victim is always granted the freedom of choice of a marriage partner. She invariably makes the wrong choice, which leads to a bad marriage and disastrous sexual relationships. As this scenario is played out in most of Hardy's novels, the men are presented as distinct types, the types being depicted with rich diversity and with steadily greater psychological depth. Hardy's rendering of sexuality in both his male and his female characters is marked by its originality and profundity. In his intuitions about sexual relations, Daleski maintains Hardy was not outdone by writers such as Lawrence and Joyce. Daleski studies Hardy within his Victorian context, but he also shows that Hardy, both in his depiction of sexuality and in his technical innovations, was in advance of his time. In these respects Hardy deserves to be regarded as a forerunner of the great modernists. In Thomas Hardy and Paradoxes of Love, Daleski offers acute and thoughtful analyses of Hardy's major novels. Avoiding critical jargon, the author has made his book accessible to all readers with an interest in Hardy and his novels, as well as in the study of gender in English literature.
Author: Hugh Epstein
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474449883
Category : Impressionism in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
This book reads the highly descriptive impressionist writings of Hardy and Conrad together in the light of a shared attention to sight and sound.
Author: Thomas Hardy
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780451530929
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 404
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Book Description
In Thomas Hardy's classic novel, an ambitious man discovers that the blind energies and defiant acts that brought him to power can also destroy him.
Author: Thomas Hardy
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101105232
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 431
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Book Description
Upon its first appearance in 1895, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure shocked Victorian critics and readers with a frank depiction of sexuality and an unbridled indictment of the institutions of marriage, education, and religion, reportedly causing one Angli-can bishop to order the book publicly burned. The experience so exhausted Hardy that he never wrote a work of fiction again. Rich in symbolism, Jude the Obscure is the story of Jude Fawley and his struggle to rise from his station as a poor Wessex stonemason to that of a scholar at Christminster. It is also the story of Jude’s ill-fated relationship with his cousin Sue Bridehead, and the ultimate tragedy that causes Jude’s undoing and Sue’s transformation. Jude the Obscure explores man’s essential loneliness and remains one of Hardy’s most widely read novels.
Author: Jil Larson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139430335
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
Drawing on interdisciplinary work in the field of ethics and literature by a diverse range of thinkers, including Martha Nussbaum, Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur, Jil Larson offers new readings of late Victorian and turn-of-the-century British fiction, she shows how ethical concepts can transform our understanding of narratives, just as narratives make possible a valuable, contextualised moral deliberation. Focusing on novels by Thomas Hardy, Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James, Larson explores the conjunction of ethics and fin-de-siècle history and culture through a consideration of what narratives from this period tell us about emotion, reason, and gender, aestheticism, and such speech acts as promising and lying. This book will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth century and modernism, and all interested in the conjunction between narrative, ethics and literary theory.
Author: Daniel R. Schwarz
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470779837
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
Daniel R. Schwarz has studied and taught the modern British novel for decades and now brings his impressive erudition and critical acuity to this insightful study of the major authors and novels of the first half of the twentieth century. An insightful study of British fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. Draws on the author’s decades of experience researching and teaching the modern British novel. Sets the modern British novel in its intellectual, cultural and literary contexts. Features close readings of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow, Joyce’s Dubliners and Ulysses, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse and Forster’s A Passage to India. Shows how these novels are essential components in a modernist cultural tradition which includes the visual arts. Takes account of recent developments in theory and cultural studies. Written in an engaging style, avoiding jargon.
Author: Arthur Efron
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004458751
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 279
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Book Description
This book interprets Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles with the openness toward experience recommended by John Dewey’s Art as Experience. The characters of Tess are considered as real people with sexual bodies and complex minds. Efron identifies the “experience blockers” that the critical tradition has stumbled upon, and defends Hardy’s involvement in telling his story. Efron offers a new way of evaluating literature inspired by Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004483594
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
Challenge and Continuity is the first full-length attempt to map an important feature of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature: the thematic novel. It analyses it first in D.H. Lawrence, revealing how in The Rainbow and Women in Love the psychology of the characters is brought into a wider social and ideological context that generates their controlling themes. Having defined an alternative tradition, exemplified by George Eliot and Tolstoy, focused primarily on individual development, it examines how that kind of interest was aligned in the nineteenth century with the thematic, in a loose fashion by Charlotte Brontë, Turgenev, Hardy and Wells, and more precisely by Stendhal, Flaubert and Emily Brontë. Challenge and Continuity goes on to identify the core of the thematic tradition in the work of Dickens, Hawthorne, Melville, Dostoevsky and Conrad. It is then revealed as a distinguishing feature of modernism in Ford, Forster, Joyce and Woolf, with continuations into Huxley, Orwell and Beckett. With its complex of well-researched links over a very wide area, this book should appeal to scholars and students alike, and also to the general reader with some knowledge of the field.
Author: G. Benziman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230348831
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
Contextualizing the topos of the neglected child within a variety of discourses, this book challenges the assumption that the early nineteenth century witnessed a clear transition from a Puritan to a liberating approach to children and demonstrates that oppressive assumptions survive in major texts considered part of the Romantic cult of childhood.
Author: Rosemarie Morgan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317041283
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 712
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Book Description
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.
