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Drawing on the expertise of leading researchers from around the globe, this pioneering collection of essays explores how geospatial technologies are revolutionizing the discipline of literary studies. The book offers the first intensive examination of digital literary cartography, a field whose recent and rapid development has yet to be coherently analysed. This collection not only provides an authoritative account of the current state of the field, but also informs a new generation of digital humanities scholars about the critical and creative potentials of digital literary mapping. The book showcases the work of exemplary literary mapping projects and provides the reader with an overview of the tools, techniques and methods those projects employ.
This book examines the role of food in the life and works of Thomas Hardy, analysing the social, political and historical context of references to meals, eating and food production during the nineteenth century. It demonstrates how Hardy’s personal relationship to the ‘rustic’ food of his childhood provides the impetus for his fiction, and provides a historical breakdown of the key factors which influenced food regulation and production from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the fin de siècle. This study explores how a sub-textual narrative of food references in The Trumpet-Major and Under the Greenwood Tree captures the instability of the pre-industrial era, and how food and eating act as a means of delineating and exploring ‘character’ and ‘environment’ in The Mayor of Casterbridge. As well as this, it considers rural femininity and the myth of the feminine pastoral in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and charts the anxieties brought about by the shift in population from a rural to a predominantly urban one and its impact on food production in Jude the Obscure.
This book explores the relationship between Thomas Hardy’s works and Victorian media and technologies of communication – especially the penny post and the telegraph. Through its close analysis of letters, telegrams, and hand-delivered notes in Hardy’s novels, short stories, and poems, it ties together a wide range of subjects: technological and infrastructural developments; material culture; individual subjectivity and the construction of identity; the relationship between private experience and social conventions; and the new narrative possibilities suggested by modern modes of communication.
This collection covers the range of Thomas Hardy's works and their social and intellectual contexts, providing a comprehensive introduction to Hardy's life and times. Featuring short, lively contributions from forty-four international scholars, the volume explores the processes by which Hardy the man became Hardy the published writer; the changing critical responses to his work; his response to the social and political challenges of his time; his engagement with contemporary intellectual debate; and his legacy in the twentieth century and after. Emphasising the subtle and ongoing interaction between Hardy's life, his creative achievement and the unique historical moment, the collection also examines Hardy's relationship to such issues as class, education, folklore, archaeology and anthropology, evolution, marriage and masculinity, empire and the arts. A valuable contextual reference for scholars of Victorian and modernist literature, the collection will also prove accessible for the general reader of Hardy.
Because Thomas Hardy is so closely associated with the rural Wessex of his novels, stories, and poems, it is easy to forget that he was, in his own words, half a Londoner. Focusing on the formative five years in his early twenties when Hardy lived in the city, but also on his subsequent movement back and forth between Dorset and the capital, Mark Ford shows that the Dorset-London axis is critical to an understanding of his identity as a man and his achievement as a writer. Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner presents a detailed account of Hardy’s London experiences, from his arrival as a shy, impressionable youth, to his embrace of radical views, to his lionization by upper-class hostesses eager to fête the creator of Tess. Drawing on Hardy’s poems, letters, fiction, and autobiography, it offers a subtle, moving exploration of the author’s complex relationship with the metropolis and those he met or observed there: publishers, fellow authors, street-walkers, benighted lovers, and the aristocratic women who adored his writing but spurned his romantic advances. The young Hardy’s oscillations between the routines and concerns of Dorset’s Higher Bockhampton and the excitements and dangers of London were crucial to his profound sense of being torn between mutually dependent but often mutually uncomprehending worlds. This fundamental self-division, Ford argues, can be traced not only in the poetry and fiction explicitly set in London but in novels as regionally circumscribed as Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading. The Novel: A Survival Skill is the fruit of a lifetime's search for a different, more immediate, but again systematic and serious way of talking about literature. Developed over many years, it offers a completely new account of the relationship between a writer, his or her work, and the reader. As such it radically undermines traditional literary criticism and the various criteria used for evaluating a work of fiction. Drawing on ideas from systemic psychology, Tim Parks suggest that both the content and style of a novelist's work, the kind of stories told and the way in which they are told, form part of a more general strategy or simply habit of communication that the novelist has learned within his or her family of origin. The reader reacts to these in very much the same way he or she would react to the same communicative strategy in a real life encounter, different readers reacting differently depending on their own backgrounds and habits of communication. Looking at the different value structures that can dominate in any family--good/evil, independence/dependence, success/failure, belonging/exclusion--this book looks at how a number of major writers position themselves within these value structures, how this positioning is manifest in their writing, and how readers have responded to this depending on their own positioning in the same semantics. Thomas Hardy, for example, a man eager to believe himself courageous but terrified of the consequences of any socially 'unacceptable' behaviour, constructs stories which are courageous in their willingness to debate difficult issues, but which constantly suggest that any attempt to behave courageously is condemned to disaster. Hardy as it were imprisons himself in a world where it is folly to take risks. He is thus exceedingly conservative in his life, while at the same time able to think of himself as courageous in his writing. The Novel: A Survival Skill looks at the way different readers in different periods respond to this depending on their own position with regard to fear, courage, social convention and so on.
The wellspring of Thomas Hardy and Religion is the recognition that Thomas Hardy's two late great novels, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, are dominated, respectively, by two religious traditions of nineteenth-century Anglicanism: Evangelicalism and Anglo-Catholicism. Placing those movements in their historical context alongside other Victorian religious traditions, the author explores the development of Hardy's religious beliefs and ideas up till the 1880s. Evangelicalism in Tess is discussed through an analysis of the principal characters, Angel Clare and his father, Parson Clare, Alec d'Urberville and Tess herself, leading to a consideration of why this form of Christianity looms so large in that novel. Not unexpectedly, the reasons for this are linked to Hardy's personal and intellectual biography, especially his religious upbringing and experience of and involvement in these religious traditions. This applies to both novels. The sources of Jude the Obscure in Hardy's life and thought, and their links to Anglo-Catholicism, are revealed in the context of the influence of that tradition on the narrative and characters, in particular Jude's sense of vocation, the importance of the university town of Christminster and issues associated with marriage, divorce and sexuality. Throughout his analysis of both novels the author demonstrates how Hardy lambasts the way in which these religious traditions and the conventional Victorian morality they bolstered undermine human flourishing. Thomas Hardy and Religion concludes by considering the place these two novels have in the continuing trajectory of Hardy's theological ideas, underlining the critical importance of understanding his religious concerns and reflecting on the way in which his critique of religion is important to people of faith.
The Science of Character makes a bold new claim for the power of the literary by showing how Victorian novelists used fiction to theorize how character forms. In 1843, the Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill called for the establishment of a new science, “the science of the formation of character.” Although Mill’s proposal failed as scientific practice, S. Pearl Brilmyer maintains that it found its true home in realist fiction of the period, which employed the literary figure of character to investigate the nature of embodied experience. Bringing to life Mill’s unrealized dream of a science of character, novelists such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner turned to narrative to explore how traits and behaviors in organisms emerge and develop, and how aesthetic features—shapes, colors, and gestures—come to take on cultural meaning through certain categories, such as race and sex. Engaged with materialist science and philosophy, these authors transformed character from the liberal notion of the inner truth of an individual into a materially determined figuration produced through shifts in the boundaries between the body’s inside and outside. In their hands, Brilmyer argues, literature became a science, not in the sense that its claims were falsifiable or even systematically articulated, but in its commitment to uncovering, through a fictional staging of realistic events, the laws governing physical and affective life. The Science of Character redraws late Victorian literary history to show how women and feminist novelists pushed realism to its aesthetic and philosophical limits in the crucial span between 1870 and 1920.