Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Prose and Poetry

Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Prose and Poetry
Author: Galia Benziman
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2018-03-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137507136

This book examines the transition from traditional to modern elegy through a close study of Thomas Hardy’s oeuvre and its commitment to mourning and remembrance. Hardy is usually read as an avowed elegist who writes against the collective forgetfulness typical of the late-Victorian era. But Hardy, as argued here, is dialectically implicated in the very cultural and psychological amnesia that he resists, as her book demonstrates by expanding the corpus of study beyond the spousal elegies (the “Poems of 1912-1913”) to include a wide variety of poems, novels and short stories that deal with bereavement and mourning. Locating the modern aspect of Hardy’s elegiac writing in this ambivalence and in the subversion of memory as unreliable, the book explores the textual moments at which Hardy challenges binary dichotomies such as forgetting vs. remembering, narcissism vs. unselfish commitment, grief vs. betrayal, the work of mourning vs. melancholia, presence vs. absence. The book's analysis allows us to relate Hardy’s elegiac poetics, and particularly his description of the mourner as a writer, to shifting late-Victorian conceptualizations of death, memory, art, science and gender relations.

Woman Much Missed

Woman Much Missed
Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2023-07-13
Genre:
ISBN: 0192886800

Woman Much Missed is the first book-length study of the many poems (over 150) that Thomas Hardy composed in the wake of the death of his first wife Emma in November of 1912. Mark Ford uses these poems to develop a narrative of their four-year courtship on the remote and romantic coast of Cornwall where they met, and then follows Thomas's poetic recreation of the slow degeneration of their marriage and their embittered final decade. Ford shows how Emma's writings and experiences during this time were fundamental to Thomas's evolution into both a best-selling novelist and into one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. Although for over a decade the marriage between Thomas and Emma had been troubled, and indeed Emma spent much time during her final years secluded in her attic rooms above his study, her death stimulated him to write some of the greatest elegies in English. Twenty-one of these, including masterpieces such as 'The Voice' (which opens 'Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me') and 'After a Journey' were collected in 'Poems of 1912-13'. While these have received much attention and are often read by school pupils and university students alike, his numerous other poems about Emma have only rarely been discussed. Ford corrects this oversight, providing accessible and insightful readings from a poet's perspective.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy
Author: Mallikarjun Patil
Publisher: Atlantic Publishers & Dist
Total Pages: 168
Release: 1997
Genre:
ISBN: 9788171567010

Thomas Hardy : The Poet Is, Undoubtedly, An Original Critical Work Which Throws Ample Light On Hardy, A Poetic Genius, So Far Neglected. From Several Perspectives Dr. Patil Analyses And Interprets Hardy'S Poetic Ouvre In An Altogether New Critical Idiom. Hardy, As The Author Argues, Is More Of A Poet Than Of A Novelist. In Fact, He Began His Literary Career As A Poet And Ended It In Becoming A Poet Of High Order. Only For The Sake Of Livelihood, He Had To Write Novels In The Middle Phase. Throughout His Life, He Was Extremely In Love With Poetry.Historically Speaking, Hardy Is Aptly Considered To Be 'A Transition Poet' As He Is The Last Victorian And The First Modern. Like G.M. Hopkins, He Made Several Experiments In Writing Poetry And Firmly Established The Modern Trend. These Things About The Poet Are Not At All Taken Seriously By Many Of His Critics; But, There Are Some Like George Saintsbury, Donald Davie, Philip Larkin And James G. Southworth Who Constantly Urge That Good Hardy Critics Are Wanted.The Present Book Explores, In-Depth, The Truth And Beauty Of Hardy'S Poetry. What The Earlier Critics Have Missed Is, Here, Pain¬Stakingly Unearthed I.E., Hardy'S Views On Love, Nature, Society, Religion, God And Universe. His Evolutionary Meliorism And Scientific Humanism Are Discussed At Length. His Robust Optimism And Melancholic Demeanour Are Also Pointed At, With A Greater Clarity And Confidence. All Those Who Want To Understand Modern Poetry Must Begin By Reading This Truly Remarkable Book. Dr. Mallikarjun Patil Was Born In 1967 In A Village In Belgaum District In Karnataka. He Graduated From Karnatak Arts College, Dharwar, And Obtained His M. A. Degree From Karnatak University. He Also Did His Ph.D., On The Existential Philosophy In Thomas Hardy'S Poetry In 1995.At Present, He Is A Lecturer In The Department Of Studies In English, In Gulbarga University, Gulbarga. He Is A Genuine Scholar And A Writer. He Writes Critical Articles And Poems. His Radio-Talks Are Regularly On Broadcast From Air, Gulbarga. His Research Articles Are Published In Encyclopaedias And Journals. His Another Critical Work Hardy'S Poetry And Existentialism Is In Press. His Sole Ambition In Life Is To Become A Full-Fledged Writer In English.

Romantik 5

Romantik 5
Author: Cian Duffy
Publisher: Aarhus Universitetsforlag
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2017-02-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 8771842950

The articles in this number of Romantik include new research on reverie and dream as the locus of metaphor in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound; an enquiry into the Royal Swedish Society for the Publication of Manuscripts Relating to Scandinavian History and the role it played in the construction of national memory and heritage; a discussion of Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg's and John Martin's iconographies of the sublime in the intersection between art and popular visual spectacle; archival discoveries related to the publication of medieval romance in early nineteenth-century Britain; and a reassessment of The Prelude as a formation narrative, arguing that William Wordsworth displays a conflicted attitude to the growth and progress usually found in the Bildungsroman. The journal also contains reviews of new books on the romantic period published in the Nordic countries.

Acquainted with the Night

Acquainted with the Night
Author: Hamish Canham
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2018-10-08
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0429896328

This book explores some of the ways in which an understanding of poetry, and the poetic impulse, can be fruitfully informed by psychoanalytic ideas. It could be argued that there is a particular affinity between poetry and psychoanalysis, in that both pay close attention to the precise meanings of linguistic expression, and both, though in different ways, are centrally concerned with unconscious processes. The contributors to this volume, nearly all of them clinicians with a strong interest in literature, explore this connection in a variety of ways, focusing on the work of particular poets, from the prophet Ezekiel to Seamus Heaney.Part of the Tavistock Clinic Series.

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens
Author: Robert L. Patten
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 865
Release: 2018-09-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191061115

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens is a comprehensive and up-to-date collection on Dickens's life and works. It includes original chapters on all of Dickens's writing and new considerations of his contexts, from the social, political, and economic to the scientific, commercial, and religious. The contributions speak in new ways about his depictions of families, environmental degradation, and improvements of the industrial age, as well as the law, charity, and communications. His treatment of gender, his mastery of prose in all its varieties and genres, and his range of affects and dramatization all come under stimulating reconsideration. His understanding of British history, of empire and colonization, of his own nation and foreign ones, and of selfhood and otherness, like all the other topics, is explained in terms easy to comprehend and profoundly relevant to global modernity.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy
Author: Tim Armstrong
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2018-10-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317863208

In Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems Tim Armstrong brings together over 180 poems in the first comprehensively annotated selection of Hardy’s poetry. Unlike most previous selections, this edition preserves the shape of the poet’s career by presenting the poems in the order in which they appeared in the Collected Poems of 1930, rather than re-ordering them thematically. Head notes to each poem give the reader information about its composition, publication, sources and metrical scheme; on-the-page notes list significant variants in Hardy’s manuscripts, point out literary and other allusions, and give explanatory glosses. An appendix contains a selection of relevant passages from Hardy’s notebooks, letters, and autobiography; and a bibliography suggests further reading. Tim Armstrong’s critical Introduction discusses Hardy’s career, his poetics, his use of memory and allusion and examines his position in the context of Victorian debates on aesthetics and belief. The generous selection of poems includes many lesser-known poems as well as those which have received most critical commentary, and the important elegiac sequence ‘Poems of 1912-13’ is included in its entirety.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy
Author: Peter Widdowson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 473
Release: 1996-11-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1349250821

Peter Widdowson's major new selection of Hardy's poetry offers the student a challenging assessment of his poetic achievement by juxtaposing Hardy's best known poems with some of his least known. In addition to the 184 poems and the selection of Hardy's prose writings (never before so fully annotated), Widdowson includes a lively introduction on Hardy's life and work, a critical essay re-assessing his place in literary history, and extensive explanatory notes on each poem and essay. The volume revitalises our understanding and enjoyment of a most enduringly popular poet and is set to prove a definitive student edition.

Reading Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems

Reading Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems
Author: Neil Wenborn
Publisher: Humanities-Ebooks
Total Pages: 116
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1847602134

Thomas Hardy is unique in English literature as a major novelist who is also a major poet. His collected poetry is among the most distinctive bodies of verse in the language, and includes such pinnacles of the lyric tradition as ‘The Darkling Thrush’ and the series of haunted love-elegies written in memory of his first wife Emma and such instantly recognizable titles as ‘Drummer Hodge’, ‘A Trampwoman’s Tragedy’, ‘Convergence of the Twain’. It is also among the most controversial. Ever since his poetry first appeared in the collection Wessex Poems in 1898, readers and critics alike have stumbled over its awkwardnesses or been seduced by its idiosyncratic music, have celebrated its unprecedented formal inventiveness or deplored its perceived lack of ambition. It has been variously read as an archetype of the Victorian intellectual odyssey, as the work of a proto-modernist, and as the fountainhead of contemporary British verse. At once traditional and modern, the acme of artifice and a conduit of intense emotion, it remains a critical enigma. This exemplary study guide seeks to set Hardy’s poetry in the context of his life, times and literary heritage, and to understand, through a close reading of selected poems, both the challenge it offers to criticism and the elusive power it continues to exert over each new generation of readers. All his collections are introduced including Wessex Poems, Poems of the Past and Present, Time’s Laughingstocks, Satires of Circumstance, Moments of Vision, Late Lyrics and Earlier, Human Shows and Winter Words.