Thomas Hardy's Shorter Fiction: A Critical Study
Sophie Gilmartin and Rod Mengham
Abstract
This critical study of Hardy's short stories provides a thorough account of the ruling preoccupations and recurrent writing strategies of his entire corpus, as well as providing detailed readings of several individual texts. It relates the formal choices imposed on Hardy as contributor to Blackwood's Magazine and other periodicals to the methods he employed to encode in fiction his troubled attitude towards the social politics of the West Country, where most of the stories are set. The book draws on the work of social historians to make clear the background of social and political unrest in Do ... More
This critical study of Hardy's short stories provides a thorough account of the ruling preoccupations and recurrent writing strategies of his entire corpus, as well as providing detailed readings of several individual texts. It relates the formal choices imposed on Hardy as contributor to Blackwood's Magazine and other periodicals to the methods he employed to encode in fiction his troubled attitude towards the social politics of the West Country, where most of the stories are set. The book draws on the work of social historians to make clear the background of social and political unrest in Dorset at the time of Hardy's writing, and offers insights into his near-obsession with the marriage contract and its legal binding of erratic men and women. No previous criticism has shown how the powerful challenges to the reader, mounted in Hardy's later stories, reveal the complexity of his motivations during a period when he was moving progressively in the direction of exchanging fiction for poetry.
Keywords:
Blackwood's Magazine,
encode,
fiction,
troubled attitude,
social politics,
West Country,
marriage contract,
legal binding,
erratic
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2007 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780748632657 |
Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: March 2012 |
DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9780748632657.001.0001 |