Thomas Hardy (Writers and Their Work) - Softcover

Widdowson, Peter

9780746307564: Thomas Hardy (Writers and Their Work)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 074630756X ISBN 13: 9780746307564

Publisher: Liverpool University Press, 1996

Widely popular throughout the world, Hardy still seems to speak to us, in fiction and in poetry, as our contemporary. In this new edition of his popular study, Peter Widdowson identifies the elements in his work which enable Hardy to be read in this way: the focus on unstable class and sexual relations in a society undergoing rapid change; the highly-charged and contradictory representations of women at the heart of this dangerously 'metamorphic' social process; the self-reflexive artifice of the writing itself as an aspect of Hardy's 'satiric' worldview; his ironic humanism in the 'new Dark Age' of the modern world. Drawing on contemporary approaches to literary study in an accessible way, the author shows where this radical and destabilizing Hardy is to be located in the texts; and similarly seeks to recast our conception of Hardy the Poet by showing how preconceived and selective it is. For this edition, Professor Widdowson has updated the Select Bibliography and has also included a 'Postscript'

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From the Back Cover:

"The many interviews and recollections which James Gibson has gathered together in this book will add greatly to our understanding of Hardy the person and Hardy the writer. The result of several years of research, it makes available not only the well-known interviews described by famous writers like Virginia Woolf and Siegfried Sasson but those of more than one hundred other people who wrote down their accounts of meetings with him. It is a useful work of reference and fascinating both in what it tells us about Hardy and what we learn in some cases about the interviewer."--BOOK JACKET.

About the Author:

JAMES GIBSON is semi-retired but still lecturing, writing and chairing The Hardy Society. He was Head of the Department of English at Dulwich College (1949-1962) and Christ Church College, Canterbury (1962-1982). He is Honorary Vice President and Chairman of the Hardy Society and Honorary Vice President of the Betjeman Society. He was presented by fellow Hardy scholars with festschrift 1994. He is the editor of The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, and the Variorum edition of that work, and of all Hardy's major novels. His acclaimed Literary Life of Hardy was published by Macmillan in 1996.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.