Critical Expansion: Criticism of the 1970s

Abstract

During the 1970s criticism of Thomas Hardy’s work, and The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure specifically, expanded rapidly and diversely. For alongside the continued development of earlier formalist and humanist approaches with their focus on close reading, internal textual meaning, the notion of the transcendent individual, and conventions of tragedy, the 1970s also witnessed the impact of new ways of reading, including those derived from structuralism, increasingly sophisticated socio-historical and political frameworks, psychoanalysis, and the emergence of feminist and gender-based perspectives. The overriding sense of the decade’s work in Hardy studies, therefore, is one of increased plurality as a number of critics — for example, J. Hillis Miller (1970), Jean Brooks (1971) and Ian Gregor (1974) — continued to emphasize the unity and coherence of Hardy’s vision and practice, whilst others — for example, Perry Meisel (1972), Terry Eagleton (1974 and 1976), Mary Jacobus (1975) and Elaine Showalter (1979) — began to of er more destabilizing and revisionary readings which took Hardy studies in new directions and marked the shift from more traditional literary analysis to more theoretically alert criticism. Certainly by the close of the 1970s, the way is paved for the impact of the theory wars of the following decade.