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This book reassesses Hardy’s fiction in the light of his prolonged engagement with the folklore and traditions of rural England. Drawing on wide research, it demonstrates the pivotal role played in the novels by such customs and beliefs as ‘overlooking’, hag-riding, skimmington-riding, sympathetic magic, mumming, bonfire nights, May Day celebrations, Midsummer divination, and the ‘Portland Custom’. This study shows how such traditions were lived out in practice in village life, and how they were represented in written texts – in literature, newspapers, county histories, folklore books, the work of the Folklore Society, archival documents, and letters. It explores tensions between Hardy’s repeated insistence on the authenticity of his accounts and his engagement with contemporary anthropologists and folklorists, and reveals how his efforts to resist their ‘excellently neat’ categories of culture open up wider questions about the nature of belief, progress, and social change.
Wessex did not spring full-born from Hardy's imagination when he began to write. The first part of the book reveals in detail how Wessex became what it is, geographically, socially and culturally, beginning with his fist poem in the 1860s and ending with Winter Words, his last collection of verse. The second (briefer) part is an account of the impact of Hardy's vision of Wessex on twentieth-century English culture, offering an explanation for Hardy's endurance as a popular novelist.
A study of the fictious world in Hardy’s novels in relation to real places and Hardy’s real-life experiences. Thomas Hardy’s Wessex is one of the great literary evocations of place, populated with colourful and dramatic characters. As lovers of his novels and poetry know, this ‘partly real, partly dream-country’ was firmly rooted in the Dorset into which he had been born. J. B. Bullen explores the relationship between reality and the dream, identifying the places and the settings for Hardy’s writing, and showing how and why he shaped them to serve the needs of his characters and plots. The locations may be natural or man-made, but they are rarely fantastic or imaginary. A few have been destroyed and some moved from their original site, but all of them actually existed, and we can still trace most of them on the ground today. Thomas Hardy: The World of his Novels is essential reading for students of literature and for all Hardy enthusiasts who want to gain new insights into his work. Praise for Thomas Hardy “Take pleasure in a book like this one, which skillfully interweaves its evocative accounts of Hardy’s life, of Dorset and Cornwall places, and of the stories unfolded from places in six of his novels (and a few poems) so that we vividly re-experience them. . . . The pleasures of this book (and they are real) come from its ability to re-enchant us in a way that is not un-Hardy-like, to draw us again into the intensely seen, heard, and felt world of the novels and poems. It set me to re-reading Hardy, with different eyes.” —Review 19
This is a short story written by Thomas Hardy was published in Wessex. This tells of a woman, a wife and a mother who aspires to be a poet and who falls in love with a male poet she never meets. As a Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society.
In The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy, some of the most prominent Hardy specialists working today offer an overview of Hardy scholarship and suggest new directions in Hardy studies. The contributors cover virtually every area relevant to Hardy's fiction and poetry, including philosophy, palaeontology, biography, science, film, popular culture, beliefs, gender, music, masculinity, tragedy, topography, psychology, metaphysics, illustration, bibliographical studies and contemporary response. While several collections have surveyed the Hardy landscape, no previous volume has been composed especially for scholars and advanced graduate students. This companion is specially designed to aid original research on Hardy and serve as the critical basis for Hardy studies in the new millennium. Among the features are a comprehensive bibliography that includes not only works in English but, in acknowledgment of Hardy's explosion in popularity around the world, also works in languages other than English.