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When the impoverished Durbeyfield family learn that they may be descendants of the royal d’Urberville family, they are delighted at the thought of owning a potential fortune and ask their daughter, young Tess, to go and stake their claim. She initially refuses, but is forced to go when she accidentally kills their horse and cripples their livelihood. But her meeting with Alec d’Urberville goes horribly wrong, and she returns home in shame. Tess later falls in love with the kind Angel Clare but is forced to make a difficult decision: to tell him the truth of her past and face the consequences, or to remain silent. The book was controversial when first published and deemed “socially unacceptable” by some as Hardy’s uniquely feminist portrayal of Tess challenged the sexual morals of the time.
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In this book, Richard Hayman traces the different values and virtues people have seen in trees and forests over the course of history, reflecting the changing use of woodland and the effects of deforestation and urbanization. Tacitus, followed by Romantics and historians of liberty, located freedom in the German forests. Medieval forests were both protected hunting parks and the refuge of Robin Hood. Shakespeare contrasted the simplicity of life in the Forest of Arden with the artificial manners of the court. Since the 18th century, poets such as Wordsworth, Clare, and Hardy have drawn inspiration from trees. How we see trees today will dictate how trees are treated in the future.
The Lost Girls analyses a number of British writers between 1850 and 1930 for whom the myth of Demeter’s loss and eventual recovery of her cherished daughter Kore-Persephone, swept off in violent and catastrophic captivity by Dis, God of the Dead, had both huge personal and aesthetic significance. This book, in addition to scrutinising canonical and less well-known texts by male authors such as Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, also focuses on unjustly neglected women writers – Mary Webb and Mary Butts – who utilised occult tropes to relocate themselves culturally, and especially in Butts’s case to recover and restore a forgotten legacy, the myth of matriarchal origins...
First published in 1940 and revised in 1965, this work by the distinguished Hardy Scholar, Carl J. Weber, traces Hardy’s literary career from High Brockhampton to the grave in Poet’s corner, Westminster Abbey. Using a multitude of letters, it explains why Thomas Hardy wrote, and how his books grew from ideas, emotions and experiences to the printed volumes that have delighted the world. This book will be of interest to those studying the works of Thomas Hardy and 19th century literature.
Indeed, relatively little work has been done on the Cretan myth cycle as a whole, a mixture of heroic Greek legend and savage, pre-Greek elements generally considered to be antithetical to evolved literary languages. As a result, although Ariadne has been extremely important in Western art from the time of ancient Greece through the nineteenth century, she is rarely included in studies of Greek myth.
Illuminating the poetry of birdsong in the Romantic and Victorian periods, this timely study dissects historical attitudes to nonhuman life.
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Religious issues played a prominent role in Victorian England and had a profound influence on the culture of that period. In Theology And The Victorian Novel, J. Russell Perkin shows that even the apparently secular world of the realist novel is shaped by the theological debates of its time. Beginning with a wide-ranging introduction that explains why a theological reading of Victorian fiction is both rewarding and timely, Perkin also addresses religion's return to prominence in the twenty-first century, confounding earlier predictions of its imminent demise. Chapters on William Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Yonge, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy are followed by a concluding discussion of Mary Ward and Walter Pater that relates Pater's Marius the Epicurean to postmodern theology and shows how it remains a religious classic for our own time. Informed by extensive knowledge of the religion and culture of the period, Theology And The Victorian Novel significantly alters the way that the Victorian novel should be read.
Throughout his fiction, Hardy offers a representation of life - particularly female life - as an evolving legal spectacle, one in which the law enables yet also interferes with human plans in the earlier fiction and eventually "prescribes" human life in the later works."--BOOK JACKET.