Reading Thomas Hardy (Reading Writers and their Work)
Cambridge University Press, 5/25/2017
EAN 9781316630808, ISBN10: 1316630803
Paperback, 166 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.1 cm
Language: English
This major new reading of the novels of Thomas Hardy, by leading critic George Levine, disentangles the author's often elaborately distanced prose from his beautiful poetic and precise renderings of the natural world. Clear, direct and minimally academic in his own writing, Levine provides an overview of Hardy's entire fictional canon, with extensive discussions of his early and late novels including his last, The Well-Beloved. Levine draws new attention to the way Hardy absorbed both the ideas and the writing strategies of Charles Darwin, and develops new perspectives first articulated in the criticism of great novelists - in particular Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Levine departs from the critical norm by reading Hardy in the context of his deep feeling for the natural world and all living things, and the implicit affirmation of life that sometimes drives his bleakest narratives.
1. Shaping Hardy's art
vision, class, and sex
2. Hardy and Darwin
an enchanting Hardy?
3. The Mayor of Casterbridge
reversing the real
Interlude
Jude and the power of art
4. From mindless matter to the art of the mind
The Well-Beloved
5. The poetry of the novels.