Hardy Deconstructing Hardy aims to add a new dimension of research which has been partly overlooked—a Derridean, Deconstructive reading of Hardy‘s poetry. Analyzing thirty-four popular and less popular poems by Hardy, this volume challenges current references to Derridean Deconstructionism. While Hardy is not conventionally considered a Modernist poet, he shares with Modernists an element that can be referred to as the linguistic crisis by which they try to get over the sense of anxiety against the backdrop of a chaotic world and problematized language. The forerunner of Deconstructionism, Derrida, exposes a long established history of logocentric thinking, which has continually been moving between binary oppositions and Platonic dualities. Derrida simply puts forward the idea that there is no logos, no origin, and no centre of truth. The centre is always somewhere else; he identifies this as a ―free play of signifiers.‖ Consequently, the anxiety of the poet with modern sensibility to find a point of reference inevitably results in a ―crisis of representation,‖ or, in a problematic relation between language and truth, the signifier and the signified. This crisis can be observed in Hardy‘s poetry, too. For this purpose, this research focuses on four key concepts in Hardy‘s poetry that expose this problematic relationship between language and truth: his agnosticism, his concept of the self, his language and concept of structure, and his concept of time and temporality. These aspects are explored in the light of Derrida‘s Deconstructionism with reference to poems by Hardy which heralded the Modernist crisis of representation. This text will fulfill the function of reconciling theory with practice and become the manifestation of the importance of Poststructuralist criticism.

Thomas Hardy's fiction has had a remarkably strong appeal for general readers for decades, and his poetry has been acclaimed as among the most influential of the twentieth century. His work still creates passionate advocacy and opposition. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy is an essential introduction to this most enigmatic of writers. These commissioned essays from an international team of contributors comprises a general overview of all Hardy' s work and specific demonstrations of Hardy's ideas and literary skills. Individual essays explore Hardy's biography, aesthetics, his famous attachment to Wessex, and the impact on his work of developments in science, religion and philosophy in the late nineteenth century. Hardy's writing is also analysed against developments in contemporary critical theory and issues such as sexuality and gender. The volume also contains a detailed chronology of Hardy's life and publications, and a guide to further reading.

Hardy insisted that his poetry steadily grew in skill and maturity. Hardy's Poetry, 1860-1928 traces this development. Gradually Hardy makes his lyric poem the model of a man's life: the way the lyric speaker forms his thoughts within the few moments of a reverie recapitulates the way a man has thought over a lifetime; the smaller interruption of the reverie portends the larger interruptions of life. This lyric model is supported by a distinctive imagery of visual patterns whose implications Hardy explores. These patterns come to symbolise the patterns of life and mind which crystallise over a lifetime and are belatedly revealed.

The author offers close readings of Thomas Hardy's poetry and novels, regarding these as expressive forms of everyday and professional acts of the imagination. Hardy is placed in the long tradition of writers who subject is not art but imagination and whose most interesting aesthetic introspectionÆs, like those of Jane Austen and George Eliot, are oblique or sub-textual. So what the reader follows here is Hardy's imagining of imagination in his elegies and nature poems and in his major characters from Gabriel Oak to Tess and Jude.The themes and forms examined by Barbara Hardy include narrative, conversation, gossip, memory, gender, poetry of place and imaginative thresholds. Altogether the study is a lucid and accessible introduction, which locates Hardy's place in the tradition of English literature.

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.

In the summer of 1876, Mark Twain started to write Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a detective novel surrounding the murder of Huck’s father, Pap Finn. The case is unresolved in the novel as it exists today, but Twain had already planted the clue to the identity of the killer. It is not the various objects ostentatiously left around Pap’s naked body; they are not the foreground of the scene, but actually the background, against which a peculiar absence emerges distinctively—Pap’s boots, with a "cross" in one of the heels, are gone with his murderer. The key to the mystery of Twain’s writings, as this book contends from a broader perspective, is also such an absence. Twain’s persistent reticence about the death of his father, especially the autopsy performed on his naked body, is a crucial clue to understanding his works. It reveals not only the reason why he aborted his vision of Huckleberry Finn as a detective novel, but also why, despite numerous undertakings, he failed to become a master of detective fiction.

When Jane Austen represented the ideal subject for a novel as "three or four families in a country village", rather than encouraging a narrow range of reference she may have meant that a tight focus was the best way of understanding the wider world. The essays in this collection research the historical significance of her many geographical references and suggest how contemporaries may have read them, whether as indications of the rapid development of national travel, or of Britain’s imperial status, or as signifiers of wealth and social class, or as symptomatic of political fears and aspirations. Specifically, the essays consider the representation of colonial mail-order wives and naval activities in the Mediterranean, the worrisome nomadism of contemporary capitalism, the complexity of her understanding of the actual places in which her fictions are set, her awareness of and eschewal of contemporary literary conventions, and the burden of the Austen family’s Kentish origins, the political implications of addresses in London and Northamptonshire. Skilful, detailed, and historically informed, these essays open domains of meaning in Austen’s texts that have often gone unseen by later readers but which were probably available to her coterie readers and clearly merit much closer critical attention.