The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy


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Thomas Hardy's fiction has had a remarkably strong appeal for general readers for decades, and his poetry has been acclaimed as among the most influential of the twentieth century. His work still creates passionate advocacy and opposition. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy is an essential introduction to this most enigmatic of writers. These commissioned essays from an international team of contributors comprises a general overview of all Hardy' s work and specific demonstrations of Hardy's ideas and literary skills. Individual essays explore Hardy's biography, aesthetics, his famous attachment to Wessex, and the impact on his work of developments in science, religion and philosophy in the late nineteenth century. Hardy's writing is also analysed against developments in contemporary critical theory and issues such as sexuality and gender. The volume also contains a detailed chronology of Hardy's life and publications, and a guide to further reading.




Thomas Hardy


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Acknowledgements -- Index




The Wessex Project


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Thomas Hardy's architectural career is not considered a success. Seen usually as a mere prelude to his literary output, it is most often summed up by reference to the 'shockingly' suburban home he built himself at Max Gate. But in this new work, Professor Kester Rattenbury argues the opposite: that far from being incidental, Hardy's architectural thinking is integral to a full understanding of his life's work. This is the first time Hardy's life and legacy have been studied by a fellow architectural writer and critic. Reconstructed from the wealth of little-known drawings, photographs, experimental illustrations and modest built work he produced or oversaw, and an architecturally-biased re-reading of his novels, this book sets out a startling new vision of Thomas Hardy's work, and how it has shaped England in fact and fiction. The Wessex Project exposes the architectural thinking and invention underlying Hardy's novels. It shows how his famous imaginary realm Wessex can be seen as a forerunner of the experimental architectural projects of our own times - in which architects weave together design, description, polemic, and images of both real and imagined spaces, to form highly developed and challenging unbuilt projects, published in books designed to change the way we see the world. The book makes a compelling case for listing Hardy among the greatest of all conceptual architects, as well as recognising him as one of the most influential and active conservationists and architectural critics of all time. This radical new perspective gives Hardy's many readers a chance, at last, to see Wessex as the author himself constructed it: through architectural eyes.




Thomas Hardy’s Vision of Wessex


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Wessex did not spring full-born from Hardy's imagination when he began to write. The first part of the book reveals in detail how Wessex became what it is, geographically, socially and culturally, beginning with his fist poem in the 1860s and ending with Winter Words, his last collection of verse. The second (briefer) part is an account of the impact of Hardy's vision of Wessex on twentieth-century English culture, offering an explanation for Hardy's endurance as a popular novelist.







Wessex Poems and Other Verses


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Thomas Hardy's "The Dorsetshire Labourer" and Wessex


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Born and brought up in a village-tradesman family, he broke away, re-inventing himself first as a professional architect, and then as a successful man of letters. The imagined societies of his rural novels are significantly selective: he ignores, marginalizes, or treats dismissively the mass of rural poor, the agricultural labourers, whose condition was a running concern of the nineteenth century. His novels focus on the independent group to which his family belonged: 'an interesting and better-informed class, ranking distinctly above' the agricultural labourers, as he pointedly tells us. His fictions are coloured with a rich rural conservatism where social attitudes are concerned. Hardy's Wessex countryside is to be valued as metaphor, not reportage: for the latter we have to turn to that huge bulk of contemporary material highlighting the situation of the agricultural poor, nowhere more severely felt than in Dorset. It is no wonder that his early readers were puzzled.




Thomas Hardy's Wessex


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THOMAS HARDY Premium Collection: 15 Novels, 53 Short Stories & 650+ Poems (Illustrated)


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This ebook collection has been designed and formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Novels: Under the Greenwood Tree Far from the Madding Crowd The Return of the Native The Mayor of Casterbridge The Woodlanders Tess of the d'Urbervilles Jude the Obscure A Pair of Blue Eyes The Trumpet-Major Two on a Tower The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid The Well-Beloved Desperate Remedies The Hand of Ethelberta A Laodicean Short Stories: Wessex Tales An Imaginative Woman The Three Strangers The Withered Arm Fellow-Townsmen Interlopers at the Knap The Distracted Preacher Life's Little Ironies The Son's Veto For Conscience' Sake A Tragedy of Two Ambitions On the Western Circuit To Please His Wife The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four The Fiddler of the Reels A Few Crusted Characters Tony Kytes, the Arch-deceiver The History of the Hardcomes The Superstitious Man's Story Andrey Satchel and the Parson and Clerk Old Andrey's Experience as a Musician Absent-Mindedness in a Parish Choir The Winters and the Palmleys Incident in Mr. Crookhill's Life Netty Sargent's Copyhold A Group of Noble Dames The First Countess of Wessex Barbara of the House of Grebe The Marchioness of Stonehenge Lady Mottisfont The Lady Icenway Squire Petrick's Lady The Lady Penelope The Duchess of Hamptonshire The Honourable Laura A Changed Man and Other Tales Other Stories Drama: The Dynasts Poetry Collections: Wessex Poems and Other Verses Poems of the Past and the Present Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses Satires of Circumstance Moments of Vision Late Lyrics and Earlier Other Works: The Dorsetshire Labourer The Rev. William Barnes, B.D. The Science of Fiction The Profitable Reading of Fiction ... Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism.




Tess of the D'Urbervilles


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A ne'er-do-well exploits his gentle daughter's beauty for social advancement in this tragic masterpiece. Hardy's 1891 novel defied convention to focus on the rural lower class for a frank treatment of sexuality and religion.