Thomas Hardy: Imagining Imagination in Hardy's Poetry and Fiction - Softcover

Hardy, Barbara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0485121530 ISBN 13: 9780485121537

Publisher: The Athlone Press, 2001

Synopsis

The author offers close readings of Thomas Hardy's poetry and novels, regarding these as expressive forms of everyday and professional acts of the imagination. Hardy is placed in the long tradition of writers who subject is not art but imagination and whose most interesting aesthetic introspection's, like those of Jane Austen and George Eliot, are oblique or sub-textual. So what the reader follows here is Hardy's imagining of imagination in his elegies and nature poems and in his major characters from Gabriel Oak to Tess and Jude. The themes and forms examined by Barbara Hardy include narrative, conversation, gossip, memory, gender, poetry of place and imaginative thresholds. Altogether the study is a lucid and accessible introduction, which locates Hardy's place in the tradition of English literature.

About this title

About the Author:

Tom Paulin was born in Leeds in 1949 but grew up in Belfast, and was educated at the universities of Hull and Oxford. He has published eight collections of poetry as well as a Selected Poems 1972-1990, two major anthologies, two versions of Greek drama, and several critical works, including The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style and, most recently, Crusoe's Secret: The Aesthetics of Dissent. His most recent collection of poems is The Road to Inver (2004). Well known for his appearances on the BBC's Newsnight Review, he is also the G. M. Young Lecturer in English Literature at Hertford College, Oxford. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was born in Dorset. He left school at sixteen to work as an apprentice for an architect who specialised in church restoration. He made his reputation as a novelist, and it wasn't until after the publication of his last novel, The Well-Beloved, in 1897, that he dedicated himself to writing poetry.

About the Author:

Barbara Hardy is a poet, autobiographer and novelist, as well as a critic whose books include three on George Eliot and three on Dickens. She is Emeritus Professor at Birkbeck, University of London, Honorary Professor of the University of Wales, Swansea, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the British Academy.

About this edition

• Publisher: The Athlone Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0485121530
• ISBN 13: 9780485121537
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 236