In Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry, first published in 1999, Matthew Campbell explores the work of four Victorian poets - Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins and Hardy - as they show a consistent and ...innovative concern with questions of human agency and will. The Victorians saw the virtues attendant upon a strong will as central to themselves and to their culture, and Victorian poetry strove to find an aesthetic form to represent this sense of the human will. Through close study of the metre, rhyme and rhythm of a wide range of poems - including monologue, lyric and elegy - Campbell reveals how closely technical questions of poetics are related, in the work of these poets, to issues of psychology, ethics and social change. He goes on to discuss more general questions of poetics, and the implications of the achievement of the Victorian poets in a wider context, from Milton through Romanticism and into contemporary critical debate.
Both blood on snow and footprints in sand illustrate the ways that bodies impress their physical presence upon their surroundings and leave behind traces of their labouring, suffering, and ...travelling. In examining the multiplicity of remnants in nineteenth-century fiction, my analysis draws upon the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur's model of triple mimesis and his definition of the trace uniting material marks with memory in order to investigate how characters' bodily agency is intertwined with residue, ruins, and reminiscence. With a comparative approach, I evaluate how two Victorian novels employ imprints, inscriptions, and stains to highlight characters' mobile bodies and thus stimulate readers' involvement in protagonists' anguish, explorations, and romantic entanglements. Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure exemplify how a wide variety of memorable vestiges assert the past infringing upon the present, thereby implicating emotional devastation, physical destruction, and crucial discoveries of hidden secrets.
The Society is often contacted by members wishing to make donations, usually of journal collections, but Sam Field of Poole has donated 17 volumes of the handsome leather-bound 'Macmillan Pocket' ...editions of Hardy's works dating from 1900-1920. The 'Adaptations' page currently features a dozen such items, with copyright held by the creators, and the provision of their contact details for those visiting the site who would like more information. Besides poetry and criticism, Johnson wrote The Art of Thomas Hardy (1894), the first book-length study of Hardy's work. ...we were contacted by a lovely lady, Caroline Vulliamy, who together with her husband is currently renovating The Old School House in Bockhampton which has been in their family for decades.
Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878) has been praised for its careful attention to the relationship between humans and their environment. Hardy traces the intricate relationship between ...local community, ecosystem, economy, and national political structures with surprising fluidity. This essay argues that his attention to detail provides an important account of the function of the wasteland in English historical development. In doing so, it also establishes the category of waste as a functional element of the character networks of narrative fiction. While Hardy's attention to waste emerges from a respect for the English rural laborer and a nostalgia for precapitalist modes of social and economic life, his valorization of English parsimony and imagination nonetheless subtend a form of nationalism coextensive with the production of British imperial ideology.
More than in any other Thomas Hardy novel major or minor, music is a key driver of plot and mirror of character in The Mayor of Casterbridge. When we first see Michael Henchard on page 2 of the first ...chapter, walking along the road toward Weydon-Priors with the wife and child he will shortly sell, he is 'reading, or pretending to read, a ballad-sheet'. Seven chapters and nearly two decades later, Donald Farfrae, passing through Casterbridge on his way to America, stops for the night at the King of Prussia inn and, while there, entertains some local townsfolk and captivates Elizabeth-Jane Newson by singing the first verse of the Scottish ballad beginning.
Introduction : the integrated mind -- Jane Austen and self-consciousness -- "A mind lively and at ease" : imagination and Emma -- "You pierce my soul" : feeling embodied and persuasion -- George ...Eliot and other-consciousness -- "A voice like music" : the problem of other minds and Middlemarch -- "Beloved ideas made flesh" : the embodied mind and Daniel Deronda -- Thomas Hardy and nonintrospective consciousness -- "Now I am melancholy mad" : mood and Jude the obscure -- "That blue narcotic haze" : dreams, dissociation, and Tess of the d'Urbervilles -- Coda : the neurology of narrative
There is a short poem by William Barnes, 'A Winter Night', which projects much the same mood as 'The Darkling Thrush': It was a chilly winter's night; And frost was glitt'ring on the ground, And ...evening stars were twinkling bright; And from the gloomy plain around Came no sound, As if that all of human birth Had risen to the final day And soaring from the wornout earth Were called in hurry and dismay, Far away; And I of all mankind Were left in loneliness behind. In Barnes's poem, the total absence of other people suggests that Judgement Day has come - universal resurrection 'from the worn- out earth'; in Hardy's, that death he is witnessing - 'The century's corpse outleant', 'The wind his deathlament'. ...the verse form of 'The Darkling Thrush' is identical to that of one of Barnes's finest poems, 'The Wife a- Lost', and has the same four stanzas. ...if one thinks about it, would it be fanciful to suggest that Hardy's 'aged thrush' giving voice to his 'full- hearted evensong / Of joy illimited', and knowing 'Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware', might have something in common with Barnes himself, whose Christian faith, to the very end of his life, was seemingly unaffected by the doubts and agnosticism which so characterized Hardy's own position.
