Hardy's Novels Research Articles

The Tess of the D Urbervilles' by Thomas Hardy Women Oppression on Heroine "Tess"

This paper is critical analysis of Thomas Hardy novel Tess of the D Ubervilles . and focus on women character Tess, Hardy novel sets in Victorian England, a time when the country was very prosperous, moreover society was dominated by a rigid social hierarchy. Victorian women was treated as second class women ,citizen and marginalized, their identities that roles in the family. such as as wife , a mother , daughter, and widow, Hardy character examined in this regard to how the functions according to these roles. The women view according to hardy novels can be placed in three groups. The first groups should include are full length Tess, Sue , Eustacia, Bathsheba, and Elizabeth. Second groups may cover Elfreid , Ethelberta, Grace, Vivette and Anne. The Third group is also a mixed on this group Paula ,Marty Arabella, Tamsie, Lucetta, Picotte, Tabitha, Matilda, FannyRobin Charlotte Mrs YEobright, Mrs.Swancourt, Melburry, Susanhenchard and few others oppression

Тема женской судьбы в романах Т. Гарди «Взор синих глаз» и «Тэсс из рода Д’Эрбервиллей»

The article presents an attempt to analyze female images in Victorian literature using the example of T. Hardy's novels "The Gaze of Blue Eyes" and "Tess of the d'Urbervilles". Through the analysis of female images, as well as a system of motives that contributes to the disclosure of the theme of female destiny.The author of the article concludes not only about the position of women in this era, but also indicates the position of T. Hardy himself regarding the mores of the Victorian era and the place of women in it.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Galia Benziman (bio) Major themes in Thomas Hardy's work that had occupied critics for generations continued to generate interest among scholars in the past year and a half. As always in Hardy studies, motifs related to the evocation of the past in the present attracted much attention. The critical focus on the impact of living history on Hardy's poetics and the interest in his representation of private and collective memory have yielded a few fascinating insights in recent publications. Hardy's novels received more extensive attention than the poems, as is usually the case; in quite a few of the essays and book chapters discussed here, his prose and poetry are studied together. While attentive to poetic form, the reading of Hardy's poetry—the subject of the current survey—is often framed in broader perspectives that subsume Hardy's published prose, his personal [End Page 372] notes, his biography and autobiography, his intellectual pursuits, and his relationship with other writers. Hardy's poetic preoccupation with the past—public, communal, and personal—was examined via varied manifestations last year, repeatedly showing the ability of history to shape individual and collective identities. Alongside essays on Wessex traditions and folklore, the representation of war, too (specifically the Great War), was looked at as a significant and formative event in history, part of collective national life that Hardy responded to and processed in ways that still require critical rethinking today. On the personal and biographical side, Hardy's retrospective gaze on his first marriage before and after Emma's demise and the crucial role that this relationship served in the development of his poetry have not been exhausted yet and continued to yield fresh critical observations in last year's research. Besides these aspects of national history and biographical history, a few studies probed literary history, placing Hardy in relation to other writers and artists and tracing intriguing inspirations and influences on his poetic oeuvre. The first group of recent essays shows how closely Hardy related communal memories to folklore, specifically folk songs. Although they tend to focus on the novels, these articles demonstrate the importance of poetry and song to Hardy as a writer. Jude Wright's article "Public and Private Folklore: The Function of Folk-Culture in The Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure" (Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature 137 [2020]: 30–43) discusses Hardy's use of folklore in his poetry and prose as a meaning-making device, a hermeneutic tool that dramatizes his characters' or speakers' need to find meaning in chaotic occurrences. Examining this theme closely in The Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure, Wright also offers a valuable preliminary analysis of a few poems—the very early "Domicilium," Hardy's first poem, and the far more famous and often-anthologized "The Convergence of the Twain" and "Ah, Are You Digging on my Grave." The reading of the poems demonstrates how throughout Hardy's career, folklorist elements served to impose narrative order and meaning on what would otherwise appear to be chaotic and random phenomena. Wright points out that legends, songs, and other types of folkloric sources "serve the function of making an incoherent world coherent for individuals and communities," which, he argues, is the basis of how folklore functions and why it thrives. "Hardy is keenly aware of the role that [folkloric] stories, allusions, and associations play in shaping humans' understanding of the world around them" (p. 35). This understanding is related to the past. Thus, in "Domicilium," it is the grandmother's vision that "represents both the world that was and its implications for the world that is," and [End Page 373] the wild woodland that once surrounded the house is "viewed through a hermeneutic in relation to the present setting" (p. 31). This layering of time, and the use of folkloric and supernatural elements as a narrative framing, is a recurrent pattern in Hardy's writing—evident in his prose but particularly so in his poems, with "the backward gaze functioning as a dramatisation of meaning-making" (p. 32). Indeed, "The Convergence of the Twain" is a perfect illustration of how the "post hoc vision...

Listening to “the Squirrel's Heart Beat”

Listening to “the Squirrel's Heart Beat”

The Matter of Aesthetic Experience

The Matter of Aesthetic Experience

Scale inTessin Scale

AbstractConcepts of scale have become urgent and contested in two thriving but seemingly unrelated fields. Humanities scholarship on anthropogenic climate change often argues that our historical present is defined by a conflict between human and geological timescales. At the same time, challenges to historicist literary interpretation have sought to rescale the temporal units we use to contextualize the objects we study. This essay argues that Thomas Hardy's novels, which often address inhuman scales of time, reveal how literary debates about scale might productively contribute to an ongoing reconsideration of historical consciousness in the context of the climate crisis. Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles recursively activates scalar multiplicity: first, by dramatizing the intersection of scales of value, time, and space; and second, by suggesting that this drama may be understood as a feature of cyclical rather than linear history. Through Tess, we may understand how literary form provides unique imaginative purchase on a crisis that is massive at the scale of geological time but mostly imperceptible at the scale of human experience.

Looking at Adders in The Return of the Native

In his essay “Why Look at Animals?” art critic John Berger discusses the gaze between humans and animals. He argues that while the gaze of animals has the power to surprise humans (who see themselves being seen through the animals' eyes), this look has been “extinguished” with the marginalization of animals from society. In Thomas Hardy's novels, humans who encounter animals face-to-face and eye-to-eye often find themselves uncomfortable being seen through the gaze of the animal. In The Return of the Native (1878), for example, Mrs Yeobright shudders under the gaze of the adder. While Berger argues for the importance of metaphor in restoring the human-animal relationship, the adder in the scene can be read not only as a metaphor for the absent-yet-implicated Eustacia, but also as a living being in its own right. Of significance to this paper is the refusal of the human-animal gaze that occurs during the encounter: the turning away, or the desire not to see oneself being seen through the eyes of another, a desire that also occurs during interactions between humans in the novel. What happens to desire when the gaze flickers, is deflected, or becomes indifference? Furthermore, how might this affect the way we look at—or away from—literary animals?

The Unreal Path to a Real Place: Six Strategies of Representation in the Novels of Thomas Hardy

Hardy's style and its peculiarities have attracted critical attention. Discussions of Hardy's language, when concerned with his prose, have noted general character of its mythic contrasted with its simple directness; (1) fine-grained studies of Dorset dialect, including Dennis Taylor's Hardy's Literary Language and Victorian Philology, delineate distinctive features of his language primarily on level of word. (2) category of artificiality has long subsumed unique features of Hardy's literary form. Raymond Williams cites as a threat to Hardy's mature style (108-9); Vincent Newey says of Jude, The book does belong, broadly speaking, to tradition of nineteenth-century realism, committed to psychological and social verisimilitude, but at same time it its own to such an extent that we are never quite allowed a secure suspension of disbelief, freedom to talk about 'life' (214). tension between and verisimilitude is a persistent one in Hardy's novels, but that tension, far from undermining his project, discloses its fundamental aesthetic and even philosophical principles. If we rescale perspective of our analysis to sentence, and include as its object articulations of syntax, way in which Hardy's style declares its own artifice illuminates numerous strategies of representation. Counterfactual constructions and passive voice, which one critic has called Hardy's jargon (Heilman 317), need to be understood for what they contribute to Hardy's fiction. first is a technique of verisimilitude. second delivers a critique of naive perception, which in turn elucidates a persistent feature of Hardy's novels: his romantic dystopias. Hardy's use of seem, observed and dismissed as the locution by which amateur writers shirk commitment (loc. cit.), is one means by which he implies a spatial field. Examining Hardy's principal linguistic structures in a connected way is critical because one informs another; taken together and related back to abiding themes and patterns of his novels, they reveal central place and crucial significance of Hardy's distinctive techniques to his aesthetic project. HARDY'S PASSIVE VOICE: THE SYNTAX OF THE UNFOLDING PERCEPTUAL ACT passive voice is one of Hardy's most persistent techniques of representation; it appears on first page of his first published novel, Desperate Remedies (1871), throughout his novelistic oeuvre, and even decades beyond it. (3) Paragraphs into his second novel, Under Greenwood Tree (1872), it renders approach of some villagers as they become audible to a man walking alone at night: Shuffling, halting, irregular footsteps of various kinds were now heard coming up hill, and presently there emerged from shade severally five men of different ages and gaits, all of them working villagers of parish of Mellstock (4, emphasis mine, as are all others). This passage depicts a particular event: entry of an object into auditory field. In unfolding encounter with a novel object of perception, what is new is not just object but also sensation of perceiving it. experience of hearing is itself integral to this moment of newly focused attention. To render this experience, Hardy employs passive voice: its syntax elevates to prominence perceptual act--were now heard--and its unfamiliarity as a locution draws attention to act as well. passive voice provides a linguistic analogue for salient quality of this sensory experience. It is a structural mimesis of this perceptual act: prominence in experience is replicated through syntax. In this same opening scene, passive voice represents entry of a character into visual field, as he becomes visible against starlit sky: Having come more into open he could now he seen rising against sky, his profile appearing on light background like portrait of a gentleman in black cardboard (4). …

Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication: Letters, Telegrams and Postal Systems by Karin Koehler

Reviewed by: Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication: Letters, Telegrams and Postal Systems by Karin Koehler Sara Malton (bio) Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication: Letters, Telegrams and Postal Systems by Karin Koehler; pp. 246. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. $124.37 cloth. To say that textual artifacts have a life of their own in the work of Thomas Hardy is no doubt to state the obvious. For if textual inscriptions and the objects on which they are inscribed—valentines, letters, books of the Bible, even human bodies (in the case of William Dare's tattoo)—are anything at all, they are volatile. They move, often in dangerous and even deadly ways. Indeed, we need only recall Father Time's suicide note in Jude the Obscure in order to recognize the intimate, inextricable connection between the written word and death in Hardy's writing. As the epigraph to that novel reminds us from the outset, "the letter killeth" (43). Focused as it is on the mobility of written communication, Karin Koehler's Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication: Letters, Telegrams and Postal Systems promises to intervene in a crucial area of Hardy's work. Following an introduction that addresses the development of the penny post and Victorian communication systems more generally, Koehler covers an extensive range of Hardy's novels in six subsequent chapters. She reads the novels in relation to a range of critical issues, such as the tension between oral and written culture in Hardy's works; privacy and desire; "postal plots" (131) in the "novels of ingenuity"; and the connection between written communication and social marginalization in the tragedies of Jude the Obscure, The Woodlanders, and Tess of the d'Urbervilles. In connection to the latter, Koehler compellingly shows how Tess's various, wrenching moments of "epistolary failure" (157) serve to "undermin[e] the fiction of epistolary empowerment" (170) promised by the expansion of Victorian communication systems. This is followed by a chapter that addresses Hardy's short fiction and poetry, and a conclusion that wisely turns toward issues raised by Hardy's control of his own correspondence, his "epistolary reserve" (210). One of the most significant aspects of Koehler's book is her treatment of the subject of privacy, in chapter 3. This issue is perhaps especially resonant for today's reader, as we continue to grapple with the increasingly fluid public/private divide when it comes to the expression of our words and intimate thoughts. Here, Koehler effectively observes that women's correspondence is frequently at the locus of suspicions and speculations regarding their sexual (im)purity. On the one hand, this should come as no surprise; we need only think back—as Koehler usefully does in her treatment of the rise and fall of epistolary fiction—to Richardson's Clarissa and Pamela to recall the persistent literary connection drawn between the female body and the textual artifact. Yet Koehler situates Hardy's innovative treatment of this connection in a way that convincingly reveals how "[t]he Victorians' intensified emphasis on privacy may be linked to changes in the social organization of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain" (47). [End Page 310] Detracting from the strength of the study is a matter that is a question of both editorial intervention and argument structure: the author's tendency toward overreliance on secondary criticism. Frequent, often lengthy quotations from other critics have a tendency to disrupt Koehler's sustained analysis. A similar need to reassure the reader emerges in the book's overall structure. The final full chapter, "Epistolary Ghosts," considers the "patterns, continuities, and shifts in [the] representation of written communication" (185) in the short story "On the Western Circuit" and a selection of poetry, including "Thoughts of Phena" and "The Torn Letter." While "An Imaginative Woman" would surely have made a perfect pairing to the book's discussion of "epistolary personae" (195), Koehler rightly points out that Hardy's shorter works are often compelling in their engagement with spectral presences in the very way that they "evoke letters by negation only" (196). Koehler does not claim to do justice here to all of Hardy's poetry, nor can she, and while I am grateful to see both poetry and short...

Thomas Hardy and His Readers: Contradictions of the Rebellious Serial Writer

This contribution explores the relationship between Thomas Hardy and his contemporary readers from The Poor Man and the Lady, his first, unpublished, novel, to The Well- Beloved, his last one. It discovers a writer split into two, with Hardy, the artist, striving to cohabitate with Hardy-the serial writer for the three decades his career as a novelist lasted. In order to fully appreciate Hardy's novels as they have reached us nowadays, after the 1912 Wessex edition, we should focus on the contradictions between their initial manuscripts, their edited versions for the family magazines and their final reconstructions into volume forms. Although Hardy certainly wanted quick success with the Victorian masses he never let go of his higher aspirations to be received differently by a more select readership, even if this alternative reading had to be done between the lines at a later stage.

Mentally, Hardy

Mentally, Hardy

Chinese Studies of Female Characters in Hardy's Novels: A Feminist Approach

AbstractHardy's novels were characterized by a great variety of women. Since the introduction of Hardy to China, critics have considered his female characters from diverse perspectives and arrived at different and even contradictory conclusions. This paper aims to outline the landscape of Chinese studies of Hardy's women characters. Particular attention will be given to the three types of women Chinese critics identify in Hardy's novels. Since studies of women figures will inevitably cover issues which are major concerns of feminist criticism, this paper will also comment on these studies from a feminist perspective. Though these critics arrive at different conclusions and hold diverse views towards Hardy's female characters, their identification of three types of women captures the intrinsic pattern and logic behind Hardy's observation and presentation of women.

The Brazilian translations of Thomas Hardy's novels

AbstractThis paper examines the existing Brazilian Portuguese translations of Thomas Hardy's novels, drawing attention to the specific problem of dialect translation, and it also examines the general reception of Hardy's works, as exhibited in articles, prefaces, translators' notes, as well as in the translations themselves. In Brazil, Hardy started being translated in the 1940s, a period in which translation and the book industry was booming in the country because of a shortage of production in Europe during the wars. Jude and The Well‐Beloved were translated in this decade, and Tess was translated in the 1960s. There was then a gap until 2003, when a new translation of The Well‐Beloved was published. But before all that, in the 1920s, Thomas Hardy was read by a rising Brazilian intellectual, Gilberto Freyre, who became interested in how Hardy combined the regional and the universal in his works so as to expand their boundaries and reinvent the regionalist genre. In contrast, Freyre's contemporary, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, sought in Hardy the tragic and the modern, associating these features with the universal appeal of Hardy's works and reflecting on their afterlife. With regard to the translation of dialect, this paper suggests that the earlier translators' strategies were closely connected to the view at the time of what constituted appropriate literary language, whereas the different perceptions of Hardy seem to struggle to fit his works into categories that related to domestic literary interests.

From Wessex to India: Adapting Hardy's Tess in Trishna

AbstractThomas Hardy's novels have been translated into Western film culture now for a century, and, most recently, a welcome filmic consideration of Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) is provided in Trishna (2010). Written and directed by Michael Winterbottom, the film is an adaptation of the tragic tale of Tess d'Urberville from Wessex into the equally difficult life of Trishna from Rajasthan, India. This article considers how Hardy's tale translates into a different, 21st century country, and how the portrait of Winterbottom's heroine and the contextual complexities found in the filmic narrative maintain – in spite of changes in place, space and character(s) – the integrity of Hardy's original novel.

Bollywood Adaptations of Tess of the d'Urbervilles

AbstractThe cinematic potential of Thomas Hardy's novels has long been recognized. Indeed, quite a few of his novels open with the reader/viewer getting a glimpse of a panoramic sweep of the English countryside, often with a solitary human figure silhouetted against a winding country lane. Focusing on two Hindi films, this essay considers ways in which Bollywood, the Hindi language film industry, has responded to Tess of the d'Urbervilles by adapting it to the Indian sociocultural milieu.

A “Network of Hopes”: The Romance of Gambling in Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean

If we had knowledge of absolute certainty could be no such thing as romance for us. If science held absolute sway, if we were not forever skirting the perilous edge of the unknown, we should never be disappointed and we should never hope ... Magnificent uncertainty is essential to the romantic atmosphere; the intellect must leave things undefined in order that imagination may define them, that the consciousness which lurks behind consciousness may hint at the wonders behind the known. (Scott-James 9) In Modernism and Romance (1908), literary critic R. A. Scott-James registers the angst of many of his literary contemporaries about the cultural forces undermining the romance novel. He recognizes the romance novel's affinity with indeterminacy, and identifies scientific rationalization as detrimental to the possibilities of the form. In discerning the threat that scientific certainty poses to hope and wonder he anticipates Max Weber's account of disenchantment in society and culture more broadly in the 1918 lecture that claimed there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play ... one can, in principle, master all things by calculation (Science as a Vocation). A pervasive concern with modern romance and disenchantment underlies the fiction of many turn-of-the-century novelists about whom Scott-James was writing, but the specific link between romance, chance and rationalization is explored consciously in Thomas Hardy's novel A Laodicean. Though Hardy had shifted all his energies to poetry by the time Scott-James was writing, Modernism and Romance contains a whole chapter on Hardy as a modernist, but it neglects any mention of A Laodicean. The omission of this minor novel is unsurprising but regrettable, since, amongst other themes, it consciously juxtaposes realism and modern romance to tease out the cultural and literary trends with which Scott-James engages. The pairing of romance and chance reveals Hardy's sensitivity to some of the major artistic, scientific, and ideological issues of his time, and suggests a project of re-enchantment for both chance and romance in the novel. The disenchantment of the modern has been a favoured historical narrative of scholars and cultural critics since its articulation by Weber. In essence, this narrative posits disillusionment as an effect of advances in science and technology that eliminate the magic of the unknown. Yet a more recent scholarly turn attempts to alter this script by looking to instances of enchantment and re-enchantment that challenge the dominant story of modern rationalization and the loss of wonder and magic. (1) In her 2001 book The Enchantment of Modern Life, political theorist Jane Bennett articulates a project for re-enchantment today with which Hardy was already involved at the end of the nineteenth century. For Bennett, fostering enchantment is both an ethical imperative, and a sort of coping mechanism that helps one respond to the challenges of a turbulent and (160). Many of Hardy's novels nakedly present such a turbulent and unjust world with little space for meaningful participation, but in A Laodicean Hardy is occupied with something akin to Bennett's re-enchantment project: Hardy's sensitivity to his own changing time is notably less morbid in this novel than in many of his others, and even hopeful as he strategically romanticizes and depicts the wonder of chance in a manner unconventional for the Victorian novel. In the twenty-first century, Bennett claims this enchantment and sense of wonder can actually be cultivated and practiced intentionally through deliberate strategies, three of which she describes as giving greater expression to the sense of play, hon[ing] sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things, and resist[ing] the story of the disenchantment of modernity (4). According to her, such practices open up possibilities, and provoke new ideas and connections (6). …

Hardy's Unnecessary Lives: The Novel as Surplus

Thomas Hardy's novels are notorious for the grim inevitability with which their characters fall prey to biological and sociological forces beyond their control. Jude the Obscure in particular, culminating in the suicide of its protagonist's children “because we are too menny,” looks not just overtly Malthusian but deterministic in every sense: a brutal lesson in the impossibility of equality. Whether one approaches it, via Michel Foucault, as an illustration of power's inexorable grasp on life or, via Georg Lukács, as symptomatic of naturalism's dehumanizing ideological bent, the story seems bound to enforce the logic of the existing social order. This essay reads Hardy's last novel in quite another political light. Turning to Jacques Rancière's analysis of the politics of literature, it suggests that the novel genre finds a basis for radical political transformation in such unnecessary lives as those that populate naturalist fiction. Hardy's characters exceed any assigned social position, yet the surplus that shapes their stories is not just demographic; it is a surplus of words and meanings, a deliberate crowding of figural space that compromises the narrator's prescriptive claims for the causality of heredity on the one hand and the division of labor on the other. Jude ultimately demonstrates that literature is, in essence, superfluous—and that “the count of the uncounted,” which Rancière recognizes as the stake of politics, is also the stake of fiction.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Rosemarie Morgan (bio) A few weeks ago in Dublin, on a misty August dawn, a great poet died. He was acclaimed by Robert Lowell as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats." But for Nobel Prize winner, Seamus Heaney, it had been, from early boyhood, Thomas Hardy who first filled his heart and mind. Heaney's aunt had owned every single copy of Hardy's novels and from the moment of reading the opening chapters of Return of the Native, I was at home with him—something about the vestigial ballad atmosphere, the intimacy, the oldness behind and inside the words, the peering and puzzlement and solitude. He was there like a familiar spirit from school days. I remember [End Page 384] hearing the poem "Weathers" read on the BBC radio when I was eleven or twelve and never forgetting it. "The Oxen" I learned by heart around that time also. I loved the oddity and previousness of the English in it. "The lonely barton by yonder coomb"—that can still make me feel sad and taken care of all at once, le cor au fond du bois with a local accent. (The Paris Review, "The Art of Poetry," p. 75) Hardy and Heaney are paired together, on the GCSE (2012) English Literature course for high school students in Britain and the resulting span not only gives measure to Heaney's "familiar spirit" but also reflects an unusual mirroring of minds. Both poets share an indelible Celtic heritage, a deep sense of communion with the earth—with the natural world—a profound respect for dialect and folklore, and a readiness to take "a full look at the worst," to borrow Hardy's famous phrase. The GCSE curriculum asks for a comparison of Heaney's "Blackberry Picking" with Hardy's "Wagtail and Baby"—poems that share, thematically, a rural setting, a child's encounter with nature and the discoveries that can be made by quietly attending, with close watchfulness, the minute activities of the natural world as it yields up its mysteries and marvels. Young GCSE scholars must also discern how structure, rhythm, point of view, and tone distinguish each poem, one from the other. Additionally, Hardy's "Overlooking the River Stour" is suggested as a mirror to the darker aspects in Heaney's "Blackberry Picking," where a sudden underlying violence takes the shape of a "A rat-grey fungus" which turns "the sweet flesh sour," and where, in Hardy, the swallows, flying in figures of eight, take on the look of menacing weapons: The swallows flew in the curves of an eight Above the river-gleam In the wet June's last beam:Like little crossbows animate. Aside from these three poems the complete selection for GSCE comprises Heaney's "Thatcher," "At A Potato Digging," "Last Look," "Trout" and "An Advancement of Learning." In Hardy's case the chosen poems for comparison are "The Old Workman," "A Sheep Fair," "An August Midnight," and "At Castle Boterel"—a poem which poignantly evokes the loss of selfhood, loss of the past youthful self which is now no more than "a phantom figure," rapidly receding, "shrinking, shrinking . . . for my sand is sinking"—in stark contrast to the surrounding rugged landscape, the primaeval rocks and their seeming permanence. [End Page 385] "At Castle Boterel," also featured recently on The Thomas Hardy Association's Poem of the Month. Phillip Mallett opened the discussion with the observation that in one of the best-known discussions of Hardy's verse, Donald Davie's essay on 'Hardy's Virgilian Purples' (Agenda 10, 1972), Davie asks whether the poem claims 'only that he will remember Emma, and the quality of this moment he shared with her, until the day he dies. Which is touching, but hardly worth saying at such length.' What justifies the poem, Davie insists, is that its claim is not psychological, about 'one mind,' but metaphysical: that the poem's 'time of such quality' is 'truly indestructible,' and its 'quality' will survive the poet's death. (http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ttha/poetry/potm/?p=242) Of the dialogues that followed Mallett's introduction the main points of interest fell upon Hardy's...

“Chartered Robbery”: Mobility, Somatic Terror, and the Critique of Marriage in Select Hardy Novels

“Chartered Robbery”: Mobility, Somatic Terror, and the Critique of Marriage in Select Hardy Novels

Bernard J. Paris: A General Drama of Pain: Character and Fate in Hardy's Major Novels

Bernard J. Paris: A General Drama of Pain: Character and Fate in Hardy's Major Novels