Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Thomas Hardy, Paperback / softback Book

Thomas Hardy Paperback / softback

Part of the Writers and their Work series

Paperback / softback

Description

Widely popular throughout the world, Hardy still seems to speak to us, in fiction and in poetry, as our contemporary.

Peter Widdowson's new essay attempts to identify 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 essay offers a sketch of Hardy criticism up to the present; re-reads all the novels in brief to show where this radical and destabilising Hardy is to be located in the text; and similarly attempts to recast our conception of Hardy the Poet by showing how preconceived and selective it is.

This short book, therefore, offers a comprehensive guide to reading Hardy anew as a writer who continues to challenge our assumptions about art and life.

Information

Other Formats

Save 11%

£12.99

£11.55

Item not Available
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information

Also in the Writers and their Work series  |  View all