Selected from over 85 Book Reviews available on Members' Research Resources Page:
Dysfunctional Families in the Wessex Novels of Thomas Hardy by Lois B. Schoenfeld. Lantham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, and Oxford: University Press of America, 2005. Pp. xii + 286. ISBN 978-0761831693. $40.00, Paper.
Reviewed by Philip V. Allingham, Associate Professor, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, in The Hardy Review, IX, p. 102 - 4:
Excerpt
-- But what is really missing from the
Wessex Novels is stable, supportive families, especially the sort of
emotionally rich life of the extended family that Hardy himself knew as
a boy at Bockhampton. The real Dorset was undoubtedly possessed of
happy children, loving parents, and successful businessmen -- Hardy's
Wessex is not ... in Hardy's world the central figure, alienated and
cut off from such emotional and financial supports, is doomed.
(link to full review)
(link to full review)
Experiencing Tess of the D'Urbervilles: A Deweyan Account by Arthur Efron. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi (Value Book Inquiry Series), 2005. Pp.262. ISBN 978-9042016941. $72.00, Hardcover.
Reviewed by Suzanne Keen, Washington and Lee University, in The Hardy Review, VIII, p. 134 - 8:
Excerpt
-- Efron, for his part, takes a Deweyan
approach, emphasizing the embodied
mind and the essential similarity of aesthetic emotions and those felt
in response to the stimuli of everyday life. ... [Dewey] does, as Efron
explains, appreciate Hardy, naming Tess
(in 1935) as one of the most influential books of the prior fifty years
(191). Dewey's emphasis on what contemporary cognitivists would call
"hot cognition," cognition with and through the emotions, seems to me
especially appropriate to Hardy's imagination of the bodies and minds
of his characters. (link to
full review)
The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain by Nicola J. Watson. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Pp. 244. ISBN 1-4039-9992-9. $65.00, Hardcover.
Reviewed by Cristina Ceron, University of Verona, Italy, in The Hardy Review, X, p. 94 - 99:
Excerpt -- The
Literary
Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic & Victorian Britain is not only a survey of a very
specific type of travel literature that encourages the reader to
situate an author's imaginative setting against the physical site of
inspiration but it is foremost a book that delves into the cultural
history of
reading. ... Yet, in spite of her solid analysis of Hardy’s
authorial stance,
Watson’s point is not always clear, and this is especially evident when
she
tries to reconcile the novelist’s elusiveness with his realistic
descriptiveness.
Starting with the incontrovertible premise that Hardy “created a region
in
which the real, although still verifiably there, actually has rather
less
purchase upon the tourist’s imagination than the overlay of the
fictive” (178),
she goes on by investigating Hardy’s alleged stance in relation to the
nature
of Wessex Wessex
Modern English War Poetry by Tim Kendall. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. 276. ISBN 978-0199276769. $99.00, Hardcover.
Reviewed by DeSales Harrison, Oberlin University, in The Hardy Review, X, p. 89 - 94:
Excerpt
-- The struggle to retrieve reality from
the grips of falsity and pretense can turn poets into warriors, heroes,
champions of the truth. But what is the relationship between this
conflict, this war of words, and other conflicts in which sticks and
stones, bayonets and rifles, machine guns and poison gas, do all the
talking? It is this question which Tim Kendall's Modern English War Poetry takes up
as its animating problem: "The most urgent issue addressed ... is the
relationship between art and violence: how, and with what difficulties
and ethical questions, can one communicate with and about the
other?" ... Asserting the limitations of Hardy's poems
illuminates instead the limitations of Kendall's approach. It is Hardy,
after all, who expands the harmonic capacities of English poetry to
include the voices of dissonance, difficulty, and strain to which so
much of English Modernism owes an unpayable debt. (link
to full review)
The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World by Amanda Claybaugh. Ithaca, N.Y. and London, U.K.: Cornell University Press, 2007. Pp.ix + 237. ISBN 978-0801444807. $45.00, Hardcover.
Reviewed by Sara A. Malton, St. Mary's University, Halifax, Canada, forthcoming in The Hardy Review, Xi:
Excerpt --
Adopting a welcome transatlantic focus, Amanda Claybaugh investigates
the relationship between the rise of reform and the development of a
distinctly Anglo-American realism in the nineteenth-century. Taking
Harriet Martineau as her model for a reformist writer, she examines the
often uneasy relationship between a series of prominent
nineteenth-century novelists and reform in an expanding transatlantic
literary marketplace. According to Claybaugh, the role that reformist
print culture played in the development of nineteenth-century
literature cannot be underestimated: “nineteenth-century novels,” she
claims, “were written, published, read, and reviewed according to
expectations learned from social reform” (7). ... Yet
“although Hardy stood on the periphery of the literary world [she]
sought to describe,” Claybaugh asserts that he is in fact worth
studying in relation to the other authors addressed in her book for his
very uncertainty about what reform can achieve: his work, she argues,
“shows that reform is not enough. And in doing so, it points
beyond the novel of purpose to something more utopian and visionary”
(186). (link
to full review)
The
Pre-Raphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel: Narrative Challenges to
Visual Gendered Boundaries by Sophia Andres. Columbus, OH:
The Ohio State University Press, 2005. Pp. xxvii +
208. ISBN 978-0814251294. $89.95,
Hardcover; $29.95, Paper; $9.95, CD.
Reviewed by Robert Schweik, State University of New York at Fredonia, in The Hardy Review, VIII, p. 111 - 120:
Excerpt
-- Finally, what is one to make of Andres'
claim that "[b]y reconfiguring in his novel the androgynous figures of
Burne-Jones's paintings, Hardy engaged in contemporary debates over the
destabilization of gender constructs the women's movement had created
since the 1860's"? Here is Andres' summary of her argument: "Unlike
Edward Burne-Jones, who suspended gender boundaries by representing
both male and female figures as androgynous ... Hardy, in his
reconfigurations of Burne-Jones's paintings, represents only Sue as
androgynous ... Sue -- that extraordinary complex and ambiguous
character as Hardy portrays her -- an "androgynous ideal"? (link to
full review)
Reading and Mapping Hardy's Roads by Scott Rode. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Pp. 126. ISBN 0415978386. $110/£50, Hardcover.
Reviewed by Rebecca Boylan, Georgetown University, forthcoming in The Hardy Review, Xi:
Excerpt
-- This
literary road trip begins with a ghost story – a true spine
tingler –
about Thomas Hardy which Scott Rode propels convincingly into the focus
of his
study on the novelist’s material and ideological re-creation of the
road “as a
palimpsest by which to critique Victorian constructions of gender
identities,
class ideologies, and power relationships” (5). ... Rode posits
that in The
Return of the Native, roads determine “the limits or margins of
desire’s
fulfillment as well as the dominating . . . power of desire and
cultural
identity” (16). Rode identifies the causeways of Tess of the
D’Urbervilles as
sites of pagan ritual and sacred pilgrimages, reaffirming the working
class, as
well as provoking technological and gender wars (16). Finally, he
argues that
roads in Jude the Obscure extend “an alternative and more
equitable mode
of gendered relationship that can reconcile ideas concerning sexuality
that the
Victorians found irreconcilable” (17). (link to
full review)
Social Transformations in Hardy's Tragic Novels: Megamachines and Phantasms by David Musselwhite. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Pp. vii + 225. ISBN 1403916624. $65.00, Hardcover.
Reviewed by Richard Nemesvari, St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia, Canada, in The Hardy Review, VIII, p. 138 - 147:
Excerpt
-- By employing the post-Marxist,
post-Freudian theories of, first of all, Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, most specifically those developed in their texts Anti-Oedipus (1972, trans. 1984)
and A Thousand Plateaux (1980,
trans. 1987), Musselwhite attempts to show the ways their "typology of
social formation" (1) can be paralleled to Hardy's exploration of
cultural conflict. ... Thus although the title Social Transformations in Hardy's Tragic
Novels may seem to promise a 'materialist' reading of the
author, what is in fact provided is a largely psychological
interpretation of the selected novels, with all of that methodology's
attendant strengths and weaknesses. I have always found doubtful the
idea that Hardy is somehow 'theory proof,' and Musselwhite's book
provides a sufficient number of interpretive insights to show that
contemporary theory can be a source of productive engagement with
Hardy's texts, even if at times its arguments are stretched to the
point that they become unconvincing. Such a difficulty, however, is
hardly the sole purview of 'theory.' (link
to full review)
Thomas Hardy: A Beginner's Guide by
Rob Abbott and Charlie Bell. London: Hodder and
Stoughton, 2001. Pp. 88. ISBN 0340800364.
£5.99, paper.
Reviewed by Shannon Rogers, Saint Joseph's University, in The Hardy Review, VI, p. 38 - 40:
Thomas
Hardy: A Bibliographical Study by Richard Little Purdy,
Charles P. C. Pettit, ed. Delaware
and London: Oak Knoll Press and the British Library, 2002.
Pp. 432, illustrated. ISBN 1-58456-070-3. $65.00, Hardcover.
Reviewed By Rosemarie Morgan, Yale University, in The Hardy Review, VI, p. 40 - 6:
Reviewed by Shannon Rogers, Saint Joseph's University, in The Hardy Review, VI, p. 38 - 40:
Excerpt -- Thomas
Hardy: A Beginner's Guide is just that -- a guide for the
student or adult reader who knows little to nothing about Hardy and is
approaching his works for the first time. ... While cautioning the
reader not to take biographical connections too much to heart, Abbott
and Bell provide relevant details about Hardy's life and background.
After all, we crave human faces for our authors. And many issues and
events in Hardy's work are obviously connected to his life. The authors
do an admirable job of explaining, in a short space, Hardy's historical
relevance in recording the passing of rural traditions, the impact of
the spread of railways, and other issues. ... A Beginner's Guide closes with
details of further sources for learning about Hardy. The discussion of
feminist responses and their various shifts will be especially helpful
to a student attempting to decipher diametrically opposed feminist
interpretations. I found the explanations of structuralism and
post-structuralism -- complete with examples -- particularly useful to
the non-literary critic. (link
to full review)
Reviewed By Rosemarie Morgan, Yale University, in The Hardy Review, VI, p. 40 - 6:
Excerpt
-- For some unaccountable reason Richard
Little Purdy's A Bibliographical
Study has been out of print for about 20 years despite the fact
that for all of that time it has been regarded as the authoritative
Hardy bibliography -- universally acclaimed for its comprehensiveness
and accuracy and holding a unique place in the World of Hardy
scholarship. "Unique" because Purdy not only had unrestricted access to
Hardy's books and private papers but, shortly after the great man's
death, also learned, directly, a good deal from his acquaintance with
Florence Hardy, and such solid family friends as Sydney Cockerell and
Harold Child. ... At another level of comprehension, Hardy became, in
fact, a veritable expert on autobiography. I would go so far as to say
that the Life-and-Letters genre of Victorian literature formed the bulk
of his daily reading material during his last years. He read
autobiographies copiously -- by the dozen. Thus, when he started his
own letter-sorting years (1917-19) and the beginning of the Life, with Florence Hardy busily
typing out his manuscript versions at his side, he had become one of
the best-versed readers in autobiography of his time. And several of
his friends knew of his self-writing of the Life -- "knew" as opposed to
"suspecting," as Pettit puts it (which instantly taints Hardy's
practices and motives). (link
to full review)
Thomas Hardy and Contemporary Literary Studies by Tim Dolin and Peter Widdowson, eds. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Pp. xii + 227. ISBN: 0-333-99445-0. £47.50.
Reviewed by T.R. Wright, University of Newcastle, in The Hardy Review, VIII, p. 106 - 111:
Excerpt
-- This collection of essays itself,
partly the product of a symposium held in Newcastle, New South Wales,
in September 2000, is designed as an exercise in testing the water both
in Hardy studies in particular and in English studies in general. Dolin
and Widdowson proceed to lament the fact that Hardy criticism has not
"turned out to be as progressively 'theoretical' as it once promised to
be." They concede, however, that it has benefited from a mixing of
professional and amateur readers and "from a strong vital tradition of
engaged anti-theoretical criticism." ... What links "amateur" readers
of
Hardy with "professionals", I would argue, and what makes the best work
of us "professionals" worth the attention of the "amateurs", is a
continuing concern to understand the novels and poems in all their
profundity, obscurity, self-contradiction, and complexity. (link to
full review)
Reviewed by Keith Wilson, Department of English, University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, in The Hardy Review, IX, p. 95 - 9:
Excerpt
-- It is often the fate of the essay
collection not to end up greater than the sum of its parts, which then
inevitably invites the question of why these particular parts should be
brought into association with each other between a single set of
covers. The editors' implicit answer to this is contained in the
millenarian resonances of the title they attach to their introduction:
"Hardy and Literary Studies at the Turn of the Century." Their
fortuitously discovered "running theme" concerning "questions about the
future sustainability of 'literary studies' and about 'the death of the
book' itself in the face of new technologies which call all in doubt"
(12) sounds more apocalyptic than the essays themselves warrant, and
Hardy studies at the turn of the century seem still to be doing much
what they have always done: bringing informed thought to bear on the
work of a major writer. Fortunately, the majority of the essays
gathered together here generously fulfill that task and are a most
welcome addition to current Hardy scholarship. (link to
full review)
Thomas Hardy and
the Survivals of Time by Andrew Radford. Aldershot, Hants.
and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003. Pp. 264. ISBN
978-0-7546-0778-6. $120.00, Hardcover.
Reviewed by Kevin Padian, University of California, Berkeley, in The Hardy Review, X, p. 84 - 86:
Excerpt
-- I think that [Radford] approaches Hardy in
the way that best addresses (if there is a best way) who he was, what
he knew, the milieu that he grew up in, how he thought about the
traditions that he inherited and lived in. In short, Hardy's soul. ...
There are very few sources that provide such a nuanced treatment of the
layers of history (and deep history, even unto archaeology and
paleontology) as Radford's book. Yet these layers are omnipresent in
Hardy's work and it is surprising that commentators have not made more
of this. Radford's thesis is, briefly, that features of culture that
seem to have no optimal rational explanation for their existence are
there because they have always been there, and survive in some bizarre
mutated form that comparative historical analysis can uncover. (link
to full review)
Thomas Hardy, Metaphysics and Music by Mark Asquith. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. 234. ISBN 978-1403941381. $74.95, Hardcover.
Reviewed by Eugene Davis, Purdue University, in The Hardy Review, IX, p. 99 - 101:
Excerpt
-- Asquith sees the nexus between music
and the increasingly pessimistic view of humankind in the novels as a
pervasive metaphor. It is wrong, he believes, to see Hardy's use of
music limited to isolated metaphors: "Instead, music forms a web which
weaves together the events unfolding in the narratives into a unified
expression of his gloomily coherent metaphysical vision." ... While I
regret its celebration of Hardy's gloomy, mechanistic philosophy, so
single minded that dissenting voices are muted, Asquith's patient study
of important Victorian debates over the role of music in life and art
extends our appreciation of Hardy's achievement and merits
praise. (link
to full review)
Reviewed by C. M. Jackson-Houlston, Oxford Brookes University, U.K., in The Hardy Review, IV, p. 46 - 9:
Excerpt
-- The focus of Thomas
Hardy, Monism,
and the Carnival Tradition raises two key questions: does this
book tell us more about Hardy's relations to the thought of his day?
Does a reassessment of the genre of The
Dynasts help us to appreciate Hardy's unique Napoleonic drama
more fully? The answer to both is a qualified 'yes'. ... In spite of
Hardy's reluctance to present himself as a philosopher, his engagement
with contemporary theoretical debate about whether the structure of the
universe is based on one sole principle (monism) or is dualistic or
pluralistic is clearly an active one. ... The major thesis here is that
The Dynasts should be
relocated 'within the serio-comical genres' and redefined as a novel
(xi). Wickens establishes a firm case that Hardy's constant use of
reversals of fortune and the folk humour in the working-class sections
of the work (and in Hardy's novels) are carnivalesque in effect, and he
recognizes the need to accommodate the overall non-comic tone of The Dynasts. (link
to full review)
Thomas Hardy on Screen by T. R. Wright, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv + 216. ISBN 978-0521840811. $75.00 / £45.00, Hardcover; $29.99 / £17.99, Paper.
Reviewed by Paul J. Niemeyer, Louisiana State University, in The Hardy Review, VIII, p. 147 - 156:
Excerpt
-- It is in this spirit of determining
what various films have to say about Hardy, and, of course, of
determining what these film adaptations say about those who create and
consume them, that editor T. R. Wright's Thomas Hardy on Screen is
presented. Wright and twelve other scholars, among them some of today's
best Hardy critics, have each contributed a chapter to this volume, and
the result is an impressive collection. In his introduction, Wright
explains that the guiding principle of the essays is not that most
shopworn issue in all of adaptation studies, fidelity; instead, the
individual authors have chosen to examine what he calls "the 'essence'
of Hardy's works" (1), the perhaps elusive quality that filmmakers have
labored to bring intact from novel to screen in a bid to make their
films suitably "Hardyesque." (link to
full review)
Thomas Hardy's Novel Universe: Astronomy, Cosmology, and Gender in the Post-Darwinian World by Pamela S. Gossin. Burlington, VT.: The Nineteenth Century Series, Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007. Pp. xvii + 300. ISBN 978-0754603368. $99.95 / ₤50, Hardcover.
Reviewed by Anna Henchman,
Boston University, forthcoming in The Hardy Review, Xi:
Excerpt
-- “Astronomical ideas and imagery are
so ubiquitous in so many of Hardy’s novels, that it is nothing short of
amazing
that no one has previously conducted a thorough study of them and their
relationship to other literary treatments of science,” comments Pamela
Gossin
midway through Thomas Hardy’s Novel
Universe (115). She’s right. ...
Hardy’s novel universe is
populated by comets that look like tadpoles of fire, spiral nebulae,
meteors,
and “double stars which revolve round and round each other and from a
distance
appear to be one” (151). His characters
plunge optically into deep space, until they can be sure that “scarce
any other
human vision was travelling within a hundred million miles of their
own”
(163). His universe contains system
upon system of bodies in motion, bound together by mutual influence
that
stretches over millions of miles. By
placing these passages next to one another, Gossin transforms the way
we see
Hardy. (link
to full review)
Thomas Hardy's Public Voice: The Essays, Speeches and Miscellaneous Prose by Michael Millgate, ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. 500. ISBN 019818526x. $110.00 / £70.00, Hardcover.
Reviewed by James Gibson in The Hardy Review, VI, p. 36 - 8:
Excerpt
-- By editing this comprehensive
collection of Hardy's non-fictional public utterances, Michael Millgate
has done yet another great service for Hardy scholarship and put us all
more than ever in his debt. ... In his introduction Millgate writes, 'what the present edition
reveals is that Hardy's public utterances were not only more numerous
than previously assumed but took many different forms and addressed a
wide variety of literary, social and political issues.' If ever
evidence were needed of Hardy's astonishing range of interests it is
here and may be seen in the 400 or so items which are
listed at the beginning of the book. (link
to full review)
Reviewed By Rosemarie Morgan, Yale University, in The Hardy Review, VIII, p. 120 - 134:
Excerpt
-- Certainly Hardy made copious revisions
to his "Wessex" construct in an attempt, with hindsight, to unify and
co-ordinate the microcosm that had emerged from the novels, but the
very fact that this proved to be too complex and often too incoherent
to effect with any thoroughgoing consistency tends, invariably, toward
the "dream." And this dream fades, distorts, and re-shapes with each
and every novel. A "vision," I would suggest, has more clarity,
coherence, epiphanic signification and more aspirations to reality,
than does a dream. A vision also bears the burden of consciousness.
"Dream" by contrast, provides greater leeway, more of an apt leeway for
the creative mind, to the irrational, the impressionistic and the
unconscious. (link
to full review)
Reviewed By Rosemarie Morgan, Yale University, in The Hardy Review, X, p. 86 - 89:
Excerpt
-- The history of illustrating Hardy is a
rich one beginning in 1872-73 with James Abbott Pasquier's woodblock
prints for A Pair of Blue Eyes (Tinsley's
Magazine) and Helen Paterson's drawings for Far From the Madding Crowd (Cornhill
1874) ... Of Miller Parker herself -- her affinity with Hardy is quite
remarkable. Her sensitive feel for the world of nature, her dynamic
settings, lyrical flowing lines, delicate figure compositions and
intricate geometric forms add a dimension to Hardy's work which is both
complementary and contrapuntal. Her art work, like Hardy's literary
evocations, is not only intensely visual but provocative. (link
to full review)