THOMAS HARDY STUDIES      

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THOMAS HARDY

 

Sexing Hardy: Thomas Hardy and Feminism

Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure: A Critical Study

Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Critical Study

Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Love and Tragedy: A Study of Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy and John Cowper Powys: Wessex Revisited

Thomas Hardy: The Tragic Novels

Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems

The Poetry of Landscape in Thomas Hardy

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

BOOKS OF RELATED INTEREST

 

Blinded By Her Light: The Love-Poetry of Robert Graves

D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover: A Critical Study

The Passion of D.H.Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence: Infinite Sensual Violence

D.H. Lawrence: Symbolic Landscapes

Amorous Life: John Cowper Powys and the Manifestation of Affectivity

Sensualism and Mythology: The Wessex Novels of John Cowper Powys

The Ecstasies of John Cowper Powys

Rethinking Powys: Critical Essays on John Cowper Powys

Postmodern Powys

LIST OF SUBJECTS
ORDER INFO
 
 

What are my books but one long plea against 'man's inhumanity to man' - to woman - and to the lower animals? Whatever may be the inherent good or evil of life, it is certain that men make it much worse than it need be.
(Thomas Hardy, 1904)

There are surprisingly few feminist analyses of Hardy, and most do not get beyond vague notions of sexism and misogynism, in the Kate Millett manner. Elvy's book, however, uses up-to-date research in the fields of cultural studies, feminist poetics, gay, lesbian and queer theory. This new, postmodern and incisive exploration of Hardy offers an exciting and radical reappraisal of the discourses of gender, desire, class, economy, socialization, identity and patriarchy in his fiction and poetry.

Margaret Elvy recently taught at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. She has written books on George Eliot, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison. She has three books on Thomas Hardy from Crescent Moon (Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Sexing Hardy: Thomas Hardy and Feminism).
 

This new edition includes a new introduction and a new bibliography.
 

Thomas Hardy Studies     Extensive bibliography and notes  190pp  ISBN 1-86171-065-8  £15.00 / $30.00
 

She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess... She had Pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries... The mouth, seemed formed less to speak than to quiver, less to quiver than to kiss... Her presence brought memories of such things as Bourbon roses, rubies, and tropical midnights; her moods recalled lotus-eaters and the march in 'Athalie'; her motions, the ebbs and flow of the sea; her voice, the viola.... Her appearance accorded well with this smouldering rebelliousness, and the shady splendour of her beauty was the real surface of the sad and stifled warmth within her. A true Tartarean dignity sat upon her brow...

(Thomas Hardy, from The Return of the Native)
 

They [Marty and Giles] had no remarks to make to each other, and they uttered none. Hardly anything could be more isolated or more self-contained than the lives of these two walking here in the lonely hour before day, when grey shades, material and mental are so very grey. And yet their lonely courses formed no detached design at all, but were part of the pattern in the great web of human doings then weaving in both hemispheres from the White Sea to Cape Horn.

(Thomas Hardy, from The Woodlanders)

Jude the Obscure, Hardy's last, great novel of 1895 is lucidly analyzed employing up-to-date developments in gender, feminist and cultural studies. Sue Bridehead is reinstated as central to the novel, and to Hardy's bitter, polemical attack on the institutions of marriage, religion, education, sexuality, identity, gender and politics.

Margaret Elvy is assistant professor, Dept of English, at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. She has written books on George Eliot, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison. She has three books on Thomas Hardy from Crescent Moon (Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Sexing Hardy: Thomas Hardy and Feminism).
 
 

Thomas Hardy Studies Series   Bibliography and notes  196pp  ISBN 1-86171-1212    £15.00 / $30.00
 
 

...there is nothing perverted or depraved in Sue's nature. The abnormalism consists in disproportion, not in inversion, her sexual instinct being healthy as far as it goes, but unusually weak and fastidious. Her sensibilities remain painfully alert notwith-standing, as they do in nature with such women. One point illustrating this I could not dwell upon: that, though she has children, her intimacies with Jude have never been more than occasional, even when they were living together. (I mention that they occupy separate rooms, except towards the end), and one of her reasons for fearing the marriage ceremony is that she fears it would be breaking faith with Jude to withhold herself at pleasure, or altogether, after it; though while uncontracted she feels at liberty to yield herself as seldom as she chooses. This has tended to keep his passion as lust at the end as at the beginning, and helps to break his heart. He has never really possessed her as freely as he desired.

(Thomas Hardy, writing to Edmund Gosse about Jude the Obscure)
 

A detailed and incisive analysis of Hardy's classic novel, using the latest research in feminism, gay, lesbian and queer theory, and cultural studies. Elvy offers a thorough reappraisal of Hardy's favourite heroine. She incorporates much of recent Hardy criticism, in which Hardy has been reappraised in the light of materialist, psychoanalytic, gender, poststructuralist and feminist criticism.

Margaret Elvy is assistant professor, Dept of English, at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. She has written books on George Eliot, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison. She has three books on Thomas Hardy from Crescent Moon (Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Sexing Hardy: Thomas Hardy and Feminism).
 
 

Thomas Hardy Studies Series    Bibliography and notes  240pp  ISBN 1-86171-1220    £15.00 / $30.00
 
 

"I have done it... He had come between us and ruined us, and now he can never do it anymore. I never loved him at all, Angel, as I loved you... Why did you go away - why did you - when I loved you so? ...I could not bear the loss of you any longer - you don't know how entirely I was unable to bear your not loving me! Say you do now, dear, dear husband; say you do, now I have killed him!"

(Thomas Hardy, from Tess of the d'Urbervilles)

A new edition of Thomas Hardy's great novel, with an introduction by Margaret Elvy.

Margaret Elvy recently taught at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. She has written books on George Eliot, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison. She has three books on Thomas Hardy from Crescent Moon (Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Sexing Hardy: Thomas Hardy and Feminism).
 
 

Thomas Hardy Studies Series    Introduction   480pp    ISBN 1-86171-1573    £15.00 / $30.00

The discourses of societal oppression, sexual repression, love, education, identity, pain and tragedy, myth and religion are Thomas Hardy's main themes. This lucid analysis of Hardy's ethics begins with the major novels and ends with an investigation of Hardy's philosophy. Not a pessimist or a 'negative' thinker, Hardy emerges as a socially committed realist, who saw that much of the pain of life is created by people, not necessarily by 'fate', time, circumstance, luck, chance or the world.
 
 

Thomas Hardy Studies Series    Bibliography, notes, 121pp  ISBN 1-871846-40-4    £14.99 / $23.50
 
 

"Now, my own, own love," she whispered, "you are mine, and only mine; for she has forgot 'ee at last, although for her you died! but I - whenever I get up I'll think of 'ee, and whenever I lie down I'll think of 'ee again. Whenever I plant the young larches I'll think that none can plant as you planted; and whenever I split a gad, and whenever I turn the cider wring, I'll say none could do it like you. If ever I forget your name let me forget home and heave!...but no, no, my love, I never can forget 'ee; for you was a good man, and did good things."

(Thomas Hardy, the ending of The Woodlanders)

Both Hardy and Powys created a poetic Wessex landscape. Hardy's Wessex has entered popular folklore and myth, and is used in the promotion of holidays, walks, tours, museums, hotels, even town councils. John Cowper Powys's Wessex, in A Glastonbury Romance and Weymouth Sands, among other novels, is less well-known: a place of secret corners, mossy walls, ancient earthworks, Somerset wetlands and ferny hollows. Both writers are discussed thematically for their sense of nature, mythology, philosophy, painting, sensualism, labour, folklore and the family. D.H.Lawrence is referenced throughout as a bridge between Hardy and Powys. Finally Robinson considers the film versions of Hardy's novels. This is a valuable addition to the criticism of Hardy and Powys.
 
 
 

Thomas Hardy Studies Series    Bibliography, notes, index and illustrations   276pp.  ISBN 1861711239   £20.00 / $40.00
 

Love, sexuality, gender, identity, politics, marriage and tragedy are the main discourses analyzed here, from a feminist perspective. Spenser reappraises Hardy's key texts (the five novels Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders and The Return of the Native) and employs the latest methodologies of feminist and cultural theory.

Tom Spenser is a poet and critic. His poetry books include Borderlands (1994) and Be-coming (1991). He has written a biography of John Keats (1986) and a collection of essays on poets such as Sappho, Catullus, Tasso and Neruda (Romantic Configurations, 1984). He lives near Abbotsbury, Dorset.
 
 

Thomas Hardy Studies Series   Index, bibliography, notes. 160pp  ISBN  1-871846-07-2    £14.99 / $23.50
 
 

Let us off and search, and find a place,
Where yours and mine can be natural lives,
Where no one comes, who dissects and dives
And proclaims that ours is a curious case,
Which its touch of romance can scarcely grace.

(Thomas Hardy, from 'The Recalcitrants')
 
 

Many of Thomas Hardy's best poems are collected here, including 'The Darkling Thrush', 'In Tenebris', 'Wessex Heights' and 'Afterwards'. This selection includes many of Hardy's most poignant love poems, such as 'The Recalcitrants', 'The Picnic' and 'He Prefers Her Earthly'.
 
 

British Poets Series  Bibliography, notes  ISBN 1-898283-11-7 61pp    £5.99 / $9.50
 
 

HER HAUNTING GROUND

Can it be so? It must be so,
That visions have not ceased to be
In this the chiefest sanctuary
Of her whose form we used to know.
- Nay, but her dust is far away,
And ëwhere her dust is, shapes her shade,
If spirit clings to flesh,,í they say:
Yet here her life-parts most were played!

Her voice explored this atmosphere,
Her foot impressed this turf around,
Her shadow swept this slope and mound,
Her fingers fondled blossoms here;
And so, I ask, why, why should she
Haunt elsewhere, by a slighted tomb,
When here she flourished sorrow-free,
And, save for others, knew no gloom?

(Thomas Hardy, 'Her Haunting Ground')

A short essay on Hardy's Wessex and his poetic vision of landscape and social múurs.
 
 

Thomas Hardy Studies Series   15pp  With Notes  ISBN 1-871846-65-X  £3.00
 
 

    For extracts from the books above, click below:
 

BOOKS OF RELATED INTEREST      

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Robert Graves, who died in 1985, is one of Britain's best love-poets, though he was first known as a war poet and author of Goodbye to All That and later the I, Claudius novels. This book focuses on his highly individual love-poetry, which is marked by lucidity, passion and freshness. The author relates the poetry to the central Gravesian concerns of the White Goddess; the magical landscapes; the role of the true, dedicated poet; the concept of Muse-poetry; his relations with Laura Riding; the Single Poetic Theme of the Goddess and Her consort, the dying god; and the mythological surveys, in particular The White Goddess and The Greek Myths. Throughout the book Graves is set alongside the erotic poetry traditions of ancient Greece and Rome, Sufism, courtly love, Elizabethan and Romantic poetry. His poetic oeuvre is compared with Petrarch's Rime Sparse and Shakespeare's Sonnets, as well as the English poetic tradition: Skelton, Donne, Keats, Hardy, Eliot and Yeats. The author also discusses Graves' associations with symbolism, witchcraft, mythology, folklore and psychology. All the major poems are featured in this important contribution to Graves studies. This is the only study of the whole of Graves' late love-poetry available.
 
 

Bibliography, notes  161pp  ISBN 1-871846-11-0    £14.99 / $23.50
 
 
 

Desire, first, by a natural miracle
United bodies, united hearts, blazed beauty;
Transcended bodies, transcended hearts.

Two souls, now unalterably one
In whole love always and for ever,

Soar out of twilight, through upper air,
Let fall their sensuous burden.

Is it kind, though, is it honest even,
To consort with none but spirits -
Leaving true-wedded hearts like ours
In enforced night-long separation,
Each to its random bodily inclination,
The thread of miracle snapped?

(Robert Graves, 'The Snapped Thread')

A new study of Lawrence's controversial last novel of transformative lovemaking, concentrating on issues such as gender, feminism, politics and censorship.

Joanna Finn-Kelcey has taught European languages at the University of Cambridge and Ohio State University. Her books include Mediaeval Representations (1991) and Dante Studies: Dante in Love, on the Vita Nuova (forthcoming).
 
 

Bibliography, notes 157pp  ISBN 1-86171-036-4    £14.99 / $23.50  forthcoming
 
 
 

I am in a quandary about my novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover. It's what the world would call very improper. But you know it's not really improper - I always labour at the same thing, to make the sex relation valid and precious, instead of shameful. And this novel is the furtherest I've gone. To me it is beautiful and tender and frail as the naked self is, and I shrink very much even from having it typed.

(D.H. Lawrence, letter, 1927)
 

Eric Gill and D.H. Lawrence

This book explores why the fiction of D.H. Lawrence continues to fascinate critics and delight readers. With television and film adaptions being churned out (notably by Ken Russell), biographies and feminist tracts being written, and much pious chattering in the media about the Lady Chatterley trial, D.H. Lawrence's work remains as topical as ever.
 
 

With notes and bibliography. 140pp  ISBN 1-871846-36-6    £14.99 / $23.50
 
 

She was in revolt. For once, she was free, she could get somewhere. Ah, the wonderful, real somewhere that was beyond her, the somewhere she felt deep, deep inside her.

(D.H. Lawrence, from The Rainbow)

'Infinite sensual violence' is one of the phrases Lawrence employs in his two great novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love which, with Lady Chatterley's Lover, form the heart of this study of love, emotion, sexuality, gender, identity and feminism in Lawrence's work. Pace sees Lawrence as still today one of the most challenging of writers, whose provocative, angry and sometimes simplistic ideas polarize critics and feminists.
 
 

Bibliography, notes, and illustrations   166pp.  ISBN 1861711395   £15.00 / $30.00
 
 
 
 
 

They threw off their clothes, and he gathered, lambent reality of her forever invisible flesh. Quenched, inhuman, his fingers upon her unrevealed nudity were the fingers of silence upon silence, the body of mysterious night upon the body of mysterious night, the night masculine and feminine, never to be seen with the eye, or known with the mind, only known as a palpable revelation of mystic otherness.
 She had her desire of him, she touched, she received the maximum of unspeakable communication in touch, dark, subtle, positively silent, a magnificent gift and give again, a perfect acceptance and yielding, a mystery, the reality of that which can never be known, mystic, sensual reality that can never be transmuted into mind content, but remains outside, living body of darkness and silence and subtlety, the mystic body of reality.

(D.H. Lawrence, from Women in Love)

This book analyzes the rich discourses of mythology, symbolism, form, eroticism and landscape in D.H.Lawrence's fiction. Foster traces Lawrence's symbols (tigers, suns, fish, peacocks) in many of the short stories, as well as the major novels. 'Spirit of place' was always important for Lawrence, and Foster's study investigates how Lawrence's concept of place informed his fiction, poetry and travel books.
 

Bibliography, notes, and illustrations   140pp.  ISBN 1861711476   £15.00 / $30.00
 

New literary criticism by one of the leading Powys scholars. Fawkner's lucid, provocative analysis focusses on love, sex, subjectivity and affectivity in Weymouth Sands and Owen Glendower.

H.W. Fawkner's previous books include Shakespeare's Miracle Plays (1992), on Charles Dickens (1977), John Fowles (1984) and the excellent Ecstatic World of John Cowper Powys (1986). Fawkner regularly contributes to The Powys Journal, The Powys Review and Powys Notes. He is Professor of English at the University of Stockholm.
 
 

John Cowper Powys Studies Series Bibliography  95pp   ISBN 1-86171-045-3      £7.99 / $12.50
 
 
 

[A Glastonbury Romance] had an electrifying effect upon me, for here speaking to me of the contemporary world (for I insist greatly upon the social exactitude of Powys's earlier novels) was a strange voice of an English Dostoevsky whose novels reproduced many of Dickens's ballets and who yet was unique.

(Angus Wilson on John Cowper Powys)
 

H.W. Fawkner on John Cowper Powys

An appraisal of one of England's great but unsung authors. Looks at his quartet of West Country books of the 1930s, Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands and Maiden Castle. The huge Welsh novels, Owen Glendower and Porius, are also discussed. The emphasis is on Powys' mythic life-philosophy, his visionary sense of landscape, and the links with his literary forebears: Dostoievsky, Rabelais, Homer, Shakespeare.
 
 

John Cowper Powys Series  Bibliography, notes  60pp  ISBN 1-871846-70-6  £8.99 / $13.50
 
 
 

I touch here upon what is to me one of the profoundest philosophical mysteries: I mean the power of the individual mind to create its own world, not in complete independence of what is called "the objective world," but in a steadily growing independent attitude of other minds towards this world. [...] The point is that we have the power of re-creating the universe from the depths of ourselves. In doing so we share the creative force that started the whole process.

(John Cowper Powys, from Autobiography)

A study of the ecstatic fiction of John Cowper Powys, one of the wildest and strangest voices in modern literature.

'An intelligent and wide-ranging survey, which both examines the importance of the notion of ecstasy in Powys's work and relates this to an astonishing range of authors and cultural practices and beliefs.' (The Powys Society Newsletter.)
 
 

John Cowper Powys Series  With bibliography and notes. 161pp  ISBN 1-86171-029-1  £14.99 / $23.50
 
 
 

What I am revealing to you now is the deepest and most essential secret of my life. My thoughts were lost in my sensations; and my sensations were of a kind so difficult to describe that I could write a volume upon them and still not really have put them down. But the field-dung upon my boots, the ditch-mud plastered thick, with little bits of dead grass in it, against the turned-up ends of my trousers, the feel of my oak-stick "Sacred" whose every indentation and corrugation and curve I knew as well as those on my hand, the salty taste of half-dried sweat upon my lips, the delicious swollenness of my fingers, the sullen sweet weariness of my legs, the indescribable happiness of my calm, dazed, lulled, wind-drugged, air-drunk spirit, were all, after their kind, a sort of thinking, though of exactly what, it would be very hard for me to explain.

(John Cowper Powys, from Autobiography)
 
 
 

A new collection of essays. H.W. Fawkner's essay ìVenusî explores issues of reading, movement, love and sex, the 'amorous self', and affectivity in A Glastonbury Romance. Ian Hughes looks at the genre of Powys's novels, and how the philosophical romances were influenced by Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean. Janina Nordius discusses the crucial Powys theme of (transcendental) solitude in the key novel of the Powys-self alone, Wolf Solent. Joe Boulter's essay concentrates on the affinities between modernism and postmodernism, pragmatism and deconstruction, in one of Powys's late novels, The Inmates, via thinkers such as William James, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
 
 

John Cowper Powys Studies Series  Bibliography, notes  82pp   ISBN 1-86171-046-1      £7.99 / $12.50
 

Extract from Rethinking Powys
 
 

New Essays on John Cowper Powys, including a postmodern reading of Powys via G. Wilson Knight, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jean Baudrillard and Gianni Vattimo; Wolf Solent, parody and postmodern fiction; Jacques Derrida and deauthorization in Powys's Autobiography; and Owen Glendower and Walter Scott.

Joe Boulter is Senior Scholar at Somerville College, Oxford.
 
 

John Cowper Powys Studies Series  Bibliography and notes  84pp  ISBN 1-86171-047-x     £7.99 / $12.50
 

John Cowper Powys by Joe Boulter
 
 

 

THOMAS HARDY

 

Sexing Hardy: Thomas Hardy and Feminism

Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure: A Critical Study

Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Critical Study

Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Love and Tragedy: A Study of Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy and John Cowper Powys: Wessex Revisited

Thomas Hardy: The Tragic Novels

Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems

The Poetry of Landscape in Thomas Hardy

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

BOOKS OF RELATED INTEREST

 

Blinded By Her Light: The Love-Poetry of Robert Graves

D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover: A Critical Study

The Passion of D.H.Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence: Infinite Sensual Violence

D.H. Lawrence: Symbolic Landscapes

Amorous Life: John Cowper Powys and the Manifestation of Affectivity

Sensualism and Mythology: The Wessex Novels of John Cowper Powys

The Ecstasies of John Cowper Powys

Rethinking Powys: Critical Essays on John Cowper Powys

Postmodern Powys

 

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