Hardy, Conrad and the Senses
Hugh Epstein
Abstract
The first book-length study of connections between these two major authors, this book reads the highly descriptive impressionist fiction of Hardy and Conrad together in the light of a shared attention to sight and sound. By proposing ‘scenic realism’ as a term to describe their affinities of epistemology and literary art, this study seeks to establish that the two novelists’ treatment of the senses in relation to the physically encompassing world creates a distinctive outward-looking pairing within the broader ‘inward turn’ of the realist novel. This ‘borderland of the senses’ was intensively ... More
The first book-length study of connections between these two major authors, this book reads the highly descriptive impressionist fiction of Hardy and Conrad together in the light of a shared attention to sight and sound. By proposing ‘scenic realism’ as a term to describe their affinities of epistemology and literary art, this study seeks to establish that the two novelists’ treatment of the senses in relation to the physically encompassing world creates a distinctive outward-looking pairing within the broader ‘inward turn’ of the realist novel. This ‘borderland of the senses’ was intensively investigated by a variety of nineteenth-century empiricists, and mid- and late-Victorian discussions in physics and physiology are seen to be the illuminating texts by which to gauge the acute qualities of attention shared by Hardy’s and Conrad’s fiction. In an argument that re-frames the ‘Victorian’ and ‘Modernist’ containers by which the writers have been conventionally separated, thirteen major works are analysed without flattening their differences and individuality, but within a broad ‘field-view’ of reality introduced by late-classical physics. With its focus on nature and the environment, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses displays the vivid delineations of humankind’s place in nature that are at the heart of both authors’ works.
Keywords:
Impressionism,
Sight,
Sound,
Scenic realism,
Senses,
Physics,
Physiology,
Victorian,
Modernist,
Field,
Nature
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781474449861 |
Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: May 2020 |
DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9781474449861.001.0001 |