Hardy's Work Research Articles

Scrolling Along: Spatial Design as Narrative in Thomas Hardy

Abstract: Thomas Hardy uses the painterly triptych of foreground, middle distance, and background in his narrative structures. These developments can be read as spatial scrolls. Their design recalls the narrative chronotope described by Mikhail Bakhtin. While the scroll is simple in form, Hardy deploys it complexly to delineate location, perspective, value, and identity. Many illustrations from his poetry such as "Wessex Heights," "The Pedigree," and "Poems of 1912–13" are examined. A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), Return of the Native (1873), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), Jude the Obscure (1895) and other novels use the scroll. The scroll design mediates the narrative interplay of optics and options in Hardy's work. The construct of Wessex is Hardy's most elaborate narrative and his most elaborate scroll.

Prometheus in the Guise of Pessimism: The Tinder of Hope that Thomas Hardy Brought to his Audience at the End of the 19th Century

This paper is devoted to the substantive significance of Hardy's pessimism, mainly based on Thomas Hardy's poems and novels written in the late 19th century. Although pessimism has been recognized as an essential feature of Thomas Hardy's literary career as a novelist and poet, he refuses to admit to being a pessimist, instead enabling the use of pessimism as the first step in exploring reality and improving the soul and body of human beings. Through a dialectical reading of Hardy's works, this paper will further analyze the specific audience groups targeted by Hardy's pessimism and the extraordinary positive impact it brought to this group at the turn of the century and during the period of social change; compare it with the literature of other culture to deconstruct the contradictions of this pessimism and extract its unique value. In addition, this paper will introduce Hardy’s precise prediction of the future movement, which can demonstrate the unique value of literature compared to political and quasi-scientific discourse.

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...

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...

Mentally, Hardy

Mentally, Hardy

A Global Hardy

Abstract‘A Global Hardy’ seeks to situate the fiction of Hardy's Wessex in a network of international exchange. It explores the part played by empire in his fiction, the value he placed on cultural dialogue, his objections to imperialism and patriotism, and the modernist multiplicity of perspective to be found in The Dynasts, as well his awareness of the limits of moves between languages and cultural contexts. In examining the circulation of Hardy's work, it pays particular attention to his navigation of copyright issues and his engagement with translators around the world as his work reached audiences beyond Europe and North America, including Russia, China and Japan. Illuminating the multiplicity of Hardy's work, as scholars, researchers and translators take Hardy Studies in new directions, the project explores ways in which his work has found new audiences in the past one and a half centuries.

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.

Perishing Heritage:

Perishing Heritage:

Thomas Hardy’s Poetics of Touch

Thomas Hardy was a man who hated to be touched. Life records this fact through an observation of a childhood playmate, and continues: peculiarity never left him, and to the end of his life he disliked even the most friendly hand being laid on his arm or his shoulder. (1) To offer a poetics of touch through which to read Hardy's work, then, may seem contrary. Yet, it may be that his dislike of actual physical contact in some sense prompted the form of phenomenological encounter that can be found in his poetry. To read his poetry in this way is to read against the grain, but to do in a way which this deceptively simple poetry encourages. In a recent issue of The Review of English Studies, Tim Dolin wrote that a constitutionally man, Hardy's mood was intensely introspective in 1915 that the idea of publishing his own memoirs must have seemed a trivial distraction. (2) Hardy is still defined through these concepts of introspection and retrospection, and it has become a critical truism that so often with Hardy, solipsism is not far away. (3) It is not surprising then that he is considered a quintessentially lyric poet, in spite of (and maybe because of) his backward-looking stance. His solitary voice seems to signal a skepticism that is more palatable to many twenty-first century critics than the colorful and effusive excesses of some of his later-nineteenth-century contemporaries. Yet it is the undeniably outward-reaching erotics of his verse (as well as his positive engagement, poetically, with modernity) that preoccupies me in this essay. To read Hardy's work in this way is not to deny the nostalgia or the interiority of his writing, but to argue that these qualities are energized by an internal tension with their opposites. Reading Hardy phenomenologically, I suggest, will enable a re-characterization of the poetry, seeing it as part of a broader trajectory of responses to the threat of solipsism inherent within modernity. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the characteristic Victorian debate about was moving instead towards an internal landscape of sensory of things. Walter Pater's meditation on subjectivity in The Renaissance demonstrated that bodily sensations had become the primary aesthetic mode of experience, and it is through this skepticism that external threaten to disappear. One obvious way to talk about this cultural and philosophical shift, as it is manifested in poetry, is through the concept of Impressionism. But although this term developed a specifically literary as well as artistic meaning, it still privileges a visual response to the world in a way that leaves out other, essentially poetic, responses to the problems of modern skepticism. Moreover, Impressionism and a Paterian aesthetics suggest a separation of the mind from the things it perceives; in both cases the mind has to decode or translate signals it receives to engage with the world: Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has every pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. (4) Yet this does not necessarily wholly reflect the lived experience of those wishing to make sense of the new skepticism. This essay will suggest that lyric poetry engages profoundly with the worries about our access to the material world that characterized fin-de-siecle aesthetics, but found other, more specifically poetic, strategies able to represent a more immediate felt connection with the world. What I explore here is a poetry that enacts what it is like to experience the world physically and immediately, rather than to decode it intellectually through the windows of the eyes. …

Taxonomic revision of the Afrotropical species of the tribe Eudorylini (Diptera, Pipunculidae).

This paper revises the Afrotropical species of the tribe Eudorylini. The four genera (Claraeola, Clistoabdominalis, Dasydorylas, Eudorylas) present in the Afrotropical Region comprise 77 species (4, 4, 8 and 61 species respectively), 15 of them are new to science: Clistoabdominalis namibiensis, Dasydorylas bodocsi, D. okongoensis, Eudorylas angolae, E. barracloughi, E. brandbergensis, E. femoralis, E. gabela, E. hirsutus, E. lobus, E. pectinatus, E. pilulus, E. protumidus, E. rooibergensis and E. skorpionensis. Six new species name combinations are published: Claraeola hadrosoma, Clistoabdominalis crassus, Dasydorylas africanus, D. evanidus, D. minymerus and D. turneri.Type material for all available species was studied and species are (re)described in detail. Drawings of male and female terminalia are presented and an identification key to the males (only males were available in the majority of the species) is provided as well as individual species diagnoses for an easier species recognition. Eight new synonymies are proposed: Dorilas (Eudorylas) dorsalis and Dorilas (Eudorylas) apiculatus to Dasydorylas evanidus, Pipunculus (Eudorylas) fractus to Eudorylas amitinus, Dorilas (Eudorylas) pusillus to Eudorylas diversus, Dorilas (Eudorylas) modicus to Eudorylas encerus, Dorilas (Eudorylas) megacanthus to Eudorylas garambensis and Dorilas (Eudorylas) quadratus and Pipunculus (Eudorylas) eremnoptera to Pipunculus mutillatus. A discussion on earlier methodology of species description within this group, in particular that of D. E. Hardy's works, is given.

<em>The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy</em>, edited by Rosemarie Morgan

Reviewed by: The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy John P. Farrell (bio) The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy, edited by Rosemarie Morgan; pp. xv + 603. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2010, £75.00, $134.95. Thomas Hardy is getting up in the world. He is here the subject of a very handsomely produced book full of distinguished critical essays and very companionable scholarly resources. The editor, a distinguished Hardy scholar and critic herself, has created a work that in both conception and execution achieves what its title implies: a "comprehensive and authoritative state-of-the-art review of current scholarship" in particular areas of Hardy studies (12). There will always be some unevenness in a collaborative enterprise such as this, but the standard of practical guidance and critical illumination is for the most part very high. This is a book of over six hundred pages, twenty-eight essays, and twenty-nine illustrations. (My favorite of the latter is J. A. Pasquier's vertigo-inducing picture of the cliff-walk in A Pair of Blue Eyes [1872-73]. No wonder Knight slipped.) The essays are grouped in eight categories, all of them reflective of recurring emphases in Hardy studies during recent decades. Not all the categories are sufficiently supplied. "Historical and Cultural Context," for example, seems underserved with three fairly specialized essays. Other sections pick up the slack, for example the rewarding discussions by Timothy Hands on Hardy's religious beliefs, Kevin Padian on "Evolution and Deep Time," and Andrew Radford on "Hardy and Scientific Humanism." Radford proposes that the Wessex novels can be read as narratives that assimilate and recreate "the 'proceedings' of the new sciences of humankind that evolved during the nineteenth century" (262). His point is well illustrated in Suzanne Keen's "Psychological Approaches to Thomas Hardy." Somewhat oddly—but perhaps wisely—the book foregoes an essay on the vexed question of Hardy's politics. It is also surprising that no single essay confronts Hardy's many experiments in narrative form, surely a hallmark of his novelistic career. Important aspects of his actual practice are discussed in superb essays by Richard Nemesvari on melodrama and by Dale Kramer on Hardy's incorporation and modification of tragic modes and themes in his novels. Nemesvari very astutely links Hardy's "version of the melodramatic mode" to his exploration of "modern states of uncertainty [and] constant flux" (83). Kramer, while perceptively reviewing a broad array of modern critical discourses on the nature of tragedy, stresses the extent to which the chameleon Hardy "is a master of the mixed genre" (384). The angle of pursuit in both of these essays (and in a number of others as well) leads to productive analyses of narrative form in Hardy's work. But the main road is not taken. Perhaps it should not be in a book whose aim is more to consolidate knowledge than to forge new trails. Nevertheless some very welcome widenings of familiar paths can be found in The Ashgate Research Companion. Rosemarie Morgan and Scott Rode in their essay on "The Evolution of Wessex" identify, with help from Heather Hawkins, Hardy's first recorded naming of Wessex in the subtitle of a poem written in 1866. This valuable essay casts a Bakhtinian eye on the roads and pathways that are usually woven into the fabric of Hardy's narratives. For good measure, it returns to Raymond Williams's characterization of Wessex as a border country situated between custom and enlightenment, labor and thought, rootedness and change. Suzanne J. Flynn surveys to good effect "the personal and cultural transitions that affected Hardy during the final years [End Page 364] of his prose-writing career and his early years as a published poet" (88). She identifies in this period a cluster of personal developments that both bore on Hardy's alienations and freed him to explore new literary territory. The essay gives some due prominence to Hardy's interest in Walter Pater. William A. Davis throws light on the legal issues that are often generated in Hardy's novels by marriage and sexual relations. He begins his essay "Hardy and the Law: Sexual Relations and 'Matrimonial Divergence'" by reminding readers that Hardy...

Empathetic Hardy: Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Strategies of Narrative Empathy

Pursuing my earlier theory of strategic narrative empathy, this essay shows Thomas Hardy's bounded strategic empathy for his fictional creations, Wessex countrymen and women; his ambassadorial strategic empathy for animals and select members of despised outgroups; and his broadcast strategic empathy for feeling humanity in an indifferent, Godless universe. Hardy's work demonstrates engagement with a variety of empathetic narrative strategies outlined in my Empathy and the Novel (2007), from the fellow-feeling of eighteenth-century moral sentimentalism, to the role-taking imagining of Romanticism, to the projection of feeling onto inanimate objects theorized by late-nineteenth-century German aesthetics as Einfühlung. Hardy's diction and notes show his knowledge of the related concepts, sympathy and altruism. At the time, sympathy (feeling for someone) was differentiated from empathy (feeling with someone); and for Hardy, altruism (nowadays seen as a consequence of empathy and sympathy) included such empathy. Hardy's strategic empathizing in his novels, in his epic poem The Dynasts, and in some of his shorter verses, I argue, links his representational strategies to his evolutionary meliorism and his belief that individual altruism might yet alleviate the painful drama of human existence. The essay details Hardy's employment of aesthetic Einfühlung to represent inanimate objects, to feel with the dead, and, paradoxically, to imagine the evolution of consciousness on the part of the unfeeling Immanent Will.

A Good Old Note: The Serpent in Thomas Hardy's World and Works

Abstract Hardy's works reference many musical instruments used in both church (west gallery) bands and his paternal family's leadership of the Stinsford Church gallery band: while the Hardy family band consisted entirely of string instruments (violins and cello), Hardy makes frequent reference to the clarinet (rendered as clarionet and clar'net), barrel organ, oboe (hautboy), drum, tambourine and serpent — the last of these is the subject of this article. Possibly the least known instrument found in Hardy's bands — if the most exotic — the serpent, its development and use in England in the early 19 th century, is of considerable interest to organologists and students of the west gallery musical tradition. Hardy's works that speak of the serpent shed light on a colourful corner of his writing and provide an opportunity to gain a better understanding of the instrument's role and sound in nineteenth century England.

The Nature and Function of Verbs in Thomas Hardy's Poetry

Abstract Strong verbal ascriptions generally sustain the force of dramatic poetry but in Hardy's work verbs are often weak and passive. The force of his poetry is mainly sustained by sensation, emotion and movements between the two: verbs which may be used to denote a strong and confident verbal communication are less frequently used in Hardy who prefers whisper, mutter, drone, regret, turn and sigh for those who desperately try to disperse the clouds of confusion that seem to surround the world they are thrust into — the world into which readers are invited through the gateways of verbs chosen by the poet.

Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree : An Althusserian Perspective

With the beginning of the 19th century, England entered into a transitional period. Sociologists believe that in each era of transformation, the ruling class tries to establish its own values, but some resistance to these new values is inevitable. Thomas Hardy's novels in general, and Under the Greenwood Tree specifically, are no exception. Based on these notions, this paper tries to interpret Under the Greenwood Tree. Much of the criticism of Hardy's work insists on the point that the created characters in his work along with their new ideas emphasize Hardy's attempts in standing against the ideological discourses of the middle-class. Under the light of Althusser's theory of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) and Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemony, Hardy can be considered as a true subject of his society, one who tries to strengthen the pillars of his society through depicting characters who have to be in the mainstream of the current ideological discourses of his age. Therefore, dealing with various aspects of this novel, this study tries to see how Louis Althusser's notions can help us to understand Hardy himself, his characters as well as the era in which he lived and wrote.

"No insignificant creature": Thomas Hardy's Ethical Turn

Elisha Cohn, "'No insignificant creature': Thomas Hardy's Ethical Turn" (pp. 494–520) This essay examines the limitations of ethically motivated representations of animals in Victorian realism. As many critics have argued, evolutionary theory's challenge to human supremacy had the potential to alter radically literature's focus on individual subjectivity and social ideals. In particular, the new relevance of animals to human life threatened to deflate the human moral ideals. The treatment of animals in Victorian literature is rarely interpreted as exploring evolution's radically anti-humanist implications. More often, animals are thought to function as objects of sympathy in a larger project of constructing middle-class subjectivity. As i argue, it is important to account for the relationship between the sympathetic and the anti-humanist representation of animals in Victorian works. The changing role of animals in Thomas Hardy's works highlights the disconnect between the radical implications that critics see in evolutionist thought and the way in which animals in Victorian writings are usually construed as objects of sympathy. Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) places these two approaches in conversation by shifting emphasis from a destabilizing lyricism associated with human-animal affinity to a more distanced narrative stance associated with human autonomy, sympathy, responsibility, and critique. Examining how Hardy grounds his ethically motivated expectations of stable human agency after having seemingly dispensed with them suggests the need for a distinction between a lyrical, evolutionist aesthetic and an ethical aesthetic. This approach also offers insight into the enabling conditions—and limitations—shaping sympathetic agency in defense of animal lives. In examining the intersections between Hardy's work and recent approaches to theories of animality, particularly those based on Gilles Deleuze's concept of becoming-animal, Tess helps us to rethink the theory, to understand why ethical claims require boundaries between species, and on what basis these boundaries can be legitimated.

A Lament and a Sigh: Voicing Disillusionment in Thomas Hardy's Verse

Abstract Hardy's work is very much about experiencing the loss of illusions, and in his verse, disillusionment often appears in two phases. The shift from one mode to the other is directly imparted to the language of his poetry, to the voice that communicates the experience of disenchantment: the poetic voice first laments the loss of illusions ('Lament,' 'During Wind and Rain'), then sighs in utter disenchantment ('The Pine-Planters,' 'A Two-Years' Idyll'). From indignation to resignation, from lament to sigh, Hardy's verse builds, through such vocal discipline, an extremely modern type of poetic rhythm which relies on the alternation between sound and silence, and on the continuity between poetic language and personal experience.

La poétique de la pierre dans l'œuvre de Thomas Hardy : du livre de pierre au livre de vie

Stones are everywhere to be found in Hardy's works. His father worked as a stonemason and Hardy himself trained as an architect. The years that he spent in London moving churchyards for the railway and restoring churches made a painful impression on him. Back in Dorset, he was confronted with the Neolithic monuments of Stonehenge and other pagan monuments such as the tumuli on Egdon Heath and other landmarks. Hardy knew all about archaeology and all about the religious aspects of the past. In other words, through the plight of characters such as Eustacia, Tess or Jude, we are always reminded about past customs such as the bonfires on the hills which recall druidic and Saxon times. Tess's tragedy is summed up by a series of stones (including the pillar of stone « Cross-in-Hand » on which is carved a human hand) and the same applies to Jude's fate (with the milestone on which he carves his name). Most characters are alienated by their education and their tragedy comes from the fact that their own time never comes ! Tess feels « at home » only at the end, on the warm slab at Stonehenge, because the pagan tomb is the only place where she can find rest and sleep.In a word, Hardy uses stones to build up his own distinction between the figurative (which refers to the classical, mimetic aesthetic) and the figural (which refers to writing as play), between the Word made flesh (when the relation of meaning to the world is one of transcendence) and when the idea is never made carnally present at all (because a novel is first of all an event of writing). In La Parole muette (1998), Rancière insists on the paradoxes of literary representation as novels seem to indicate an embodied world that is forever awaiting embodiment, a liminal world which reminds us of Derrida's concept of the « spectral ». Rancière's works are helpful because they help us find a way out of the usual barren oppositions between mimetic aesthetics and the postmodern conceptions of representation as he shows us how literature manages to reorganize the relations between past and future communities and between words and things.

Thomas Hardy: the guarded life

Few writers are as strongly associated with a particular place as Thomas Hardy. His role as unofficial historian of Wessex has come to define his reputation, yet only hints at the complexities of a man who cultivated aristocratic friends, spent several months each year in London and wrote some of the most popular, but also most vilified, novels of the Victorian period. In The Guarded Life, Ralph Pite explores these contradictions in the context of Hardy's relationships with women, friends and mentors; the social, family and work pressures he experienced; and his attachment to the Dorsetshire landscape. In doing so, he reveals the personal and emotional life of a public figure who has, despite his fame, remained largely obscure until now. 'Pite uses new critical techniques and perspectives to make his point ...He is a subtle reader of Hardy's work and applies his impressive reasoning to the man as if he, too, were a kind of text' Daily Telegraph 'An impressive, and impressively human, book, Pite's skill is in balancing the larger sweep of Hardy's life with a sense for what happened at the edges. Like his subject, Pite takes risks with what he reveals, but the detail is always enlarging. Hardy, and his times, seem bigger for this work' New Statesman 'In portraits, Hardy habitually looks downwards or aside, avoiding direct contact. In this biography, Pite has caught his subject's eyes and held his gaze' The Times 'Pite is skilful, not to say ingenious, in drawing together emblems and instances of secrecy ...This new biography encourages us to re-examine Hardy's life as a complex and often self-contradictory whole; Pite's Hardy is altogether more vulnerable than Hardy's version of himself, but also more likeable' Guardian

A comparative reading of John Steinbeck's and Frank Hardy's works

Although belonging to literatures spatially and traditionally very remote from each other, John Steinbeck, an American Nobel Prize winner, and Frank Hardy, an Australian novelist and story-teller, share a number of common grounds. The fact that by the time Hardy wrote his first novel, in 1950, Steinbeck was already a popular writer with a long list of masterpieces does not justify the assumption that Hardy had Steinbeck at hand when writing his best-sellers, but it does exclude the opposite direction of inheritance. Hardy's creativ impulses and appropriations may have been the unconscious results of his omnivorous reading after he realized that "the transition from short stories [in which he excelled] to the novel was an obstacle not easily surmounted" as he confessed in The Hard Way: The Story Behind "Power Without Glory" (109). Furthermore, since both were highly regarded proletarian writers in communist Russia, Hardy might have become acquainted with Steinbeck's novels on one of his frequent visits to that country between 1951 and 1969.2 Upon closer reading, inter-textual entanglements with Steinbeck's prose can be detected in several of his books, including But the Dead Are Many (1975), the Billy Borker material collected in The Yarns of Billy Barker (1965) and in The Great Australian Lover and Other Stories (1967), and in Power Without Glory (1950). My purpose in this essay is to briefly illuminate the most striking similarities between the two authors' narrative strategies in terms of their writing style, narrative technique, and subject matter, and link these textual affinities to the larger social and cultural milieu of each author. In the second part I will focus on the parallels between their central works, Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Hardy's Power Without Glory.