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Michael Millgate's classic biography of the great novelist and poet Thomas Hardy was first published in 1982. Much new information about Hardy has since become available, often in volumes edited or co-edited by Millgate himself, and many established assumptions have been challenged and revolutionized by scholarly research. In this extensively revised, fully reconsidered, and considerably expanded new edition the world's leading Hardy scholar draws not only upon these new materials but upon an exceptional understanding of Hardy gained from long immersion in the study of his life and work. Many large and small aspects of Hardy's life are here freshly illuminated, including his family background, his fumbling self-education as a poet, his difficult relations with his first wife and hers with his family, his sexual infatuations, his secret collaborations with aspiring women writers, his clandestine composition of his own official biography, and the memory-invoking techniques by which he sustained his remarkable creativity into extreme old age. Thorough, authoritative, and eminently readable, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited is now the standard life of Hardy for a new generation.
As a writer who achieved major eminence in both fiction and poetry and whose engagement with these genres encompassed the period of transition from Victorianism to Modernism, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) enjoys a unique position in English Literary History. Michael Millgate, University Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Toronto is widely recognized as the world's foremost Thomas Hardy scholar. His contributions to the study of Hardy over more than three decades include his recently 'revisited' biography, the seven volume edition of Hardy's collected letters, and the influential critical study Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist. In Thomas Hardy Reappraised, editor Keith Wilson...
A comprehensive account of the author's life based upon many previously unknown materials.
One of the literary world's great deceptions was perpetrated when Thomas Hardy wrote his Life in secret for publication after his death as an official biography. Since the true circumstances of its composition have been known The Early Life and Later Years of Thomas Hardy, published over the name of Florence Emily Hardy, has frequently been referred to as Hardy's autobiography. But this is not the whole truth: Florence altered much of what Hardy meant to appear in his 'biography'. Through careful examination of pre- publication texts, Michael Millgate has retrieved the text as it stood at the time of Hardy's final revision. For the first time The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy can be read as a true work of autobiography - an addition to the Hardy canon.
Through original essays from a distinguished team of international scholars and Hardy specialists, A Companion to Thomas Hardy provides a unique, one-volume resource, which encompasses all aspects of Hardy's major novels, short stories, and poetry Informed by the latest in scholarly, critical, and theoretical debates from some of the world's leading Hardy scholars Reveals groundbreaking insights through examinations of Hardy’s major novels, short stories, poetry, and drama Explores Hardy's work in the context of the major intellectual and socio-cultural currents of his time and assesses his legacy for subsequent writers
The poems of Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) are key to understanding 19th, 20th and even 21st century poetry. This collection of fresh essays sheds new light on Hardy's poems--some of which have received little critical attention--from a variety of thematic and analytical approaches, offering a detailed picture of how his works are currently being read. The contributors discuss why Hardy's poetic genius is less and less overshadowed by his career as a novelist and highlight his passionate attention to small details, his delight in "noticing things" and his "eye for...mysteries."
A collection of poems reflecting Thomas Hardy's tumultuous marriage to Emma Gifford. In many of his poems, the great Dorset poet and novelist Thomas Hardy referred to a certain romantic courtship, a marriage which became progressively more problematical, and finally to a bereavement in which a man loses his wife. So, who was Hardy writing about? The clue is to be found in his early poems, where the names of several locations in North Cornwall are mentioned, this being the very same place which featured in Hardy’s courtship of Emma Gifford, who was to become his first wife. The poems raise certain questions. Given that Hardy and Emma gradually drifted apart so that in the end they lived mai...
The co-ordinating theme of this study is that Hardy designed Tess of the d'Urbervilles to be controversial, and it has surpassed his design. An initial biographical chapter relates Tess to Hardy's career: the novel caused scandal but brought him wealth. Next, the work's process of composition is discussed, and differences between the censored serial and the book versions are explained. An analysis of the plot gives particular attention to its ironic strategies, and a further section deals with problematic aspects of characterisation, including the views of the narrator. Various themes and contexts are explored, notably Hardy's attitudes to religion, evolution, politics and sexuality. There follows a discussion of selected literary aspects: naturalism and realism, leitmotifs and thematic patterns, optical effects and defamiliarisation, and the use of specialised vocabularies. Hardy's descriptive powers when rendering the rural world receive particular analysis. A critical survey then summarises critical approaches to this novel between Hardy's day and the present.
The wellspring of Thomas Hardy and Religion is the recognition that Thomas Hardy's two late great novels, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, are dominated, respectively, by two religious traditions of nineteenth-century Anglicanism: Evangelicalism and Anglo-Catholicism. Placing those movements in their historical context alongside other Victorian religious traditions, the author explores the development of Hardy's religious beliefs and ideas up till the 1880s. Evangelicalism in Tess is discussed through an analysis of the principal characters, Angel Clare and his father, Parson Clare, Alec d'Urberville and Tess herself, leading to a consideration of why this form of Christianity...
Explores Thomas Hardy's engagement with Victorian legal debates in his prose fiction. Thomas Hardy's fiction is examined in this book in the context of the seismic legal reforms of the nineteenth century as well as legal discourse in the literature of the era. The book examines the ways in which Hardy's role as a magistrate and his interest in the law impacted fundamentally on his prose fiction. It demonstrates that throughout his prose fiction Hardy engages with contentious legal issues that were debated by legal professionals and literary figures of his day, and argues that Hardy used fiction as a forum to question the extent to which legal reform improved the lives of women and the working classes.The study also looks at the ways in which Hardy deployed criminal plots derived from sensation fiction and reveals that the genre's engagement with legal reform influenced not only his sensation novel Desperate Remedies (1871) but also the plots of his subsequent fiction.