Thomas Hardy: Folklore and Resistance
Thomas Hardy: Folklore and Resistance

Author: Jacqueline Dillion

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-09-23

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1137503203

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book reassesses Hardy’s fiction in the light of his prolonged engagement with the folklore and traditions of rural England. Drawing on wide research, it demonstrates the pivotal role played in the novels by such customs and beliefs as ‘overlooking’, hag-riding, skimmington-riding, sympathetic magic, mumming, bonfire nights, May Day celebrations, Midsummer divination, and the ‘Portland Custom’. This study shows how such traditions were lived out in practice in village life, and how they were represented in written texts – in literature, newspapers, county histories, folklore books, the work of the Folklore Society, archival documents, and letters. It explores tensions between Hardy’s repeated insistence on the authenticity of his accounts and his engagement with contemporary anthropologists and folklorists, and reveals how his efforts to resist their ‘excellently neat’ categories of culture open up wider questions about the nature of belief, progress, and social change.

Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy

Author: Mark Ford

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2016-10-10

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 067473789X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Acknowledgements -- Index

The Withered Arm and Other Stories 1874-1888
The Withered Arm and Other Stories 1874-1888

Author: Thomas Hardy

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2006-08-31

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 0141938110

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"See if she is dark or fair, and if you can, notice if her hands be white; if not, see if they look as though she had ever done housework, or are milker's hands like mine." So Rhoda Brook, the abandoned mistress of Farmer Lodge, is jealous to discover details of his new bride in 'The Withered Arm', the title story in this selection of Hardy's finest short stories. Hardy's first story, 'Destiny and a Blue Cloak' was written fresh from the success of Far From the Madding Crowd. Beautiful in their own right, these stories are also testing-grounds for the novels in their controversial sexual politics, their refusal of romance structures, and their elegiac pursuit of past, lost loves. Several of the stories in The Withered Arm were collected to form the famous volume, Wessex Tales (1888), the first time Hardy denoted 'Wessex' to describe his fictional world. The Withered Arm is the first of a new two-volume selection of Hardy's short stories, edited with an introduction and notes by Kristin Brady.

Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy

Author: Ronald D. Morrison

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2021-05-13

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1476643016

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Thomas Hardy enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a novelist before devoting his talents to writing poetry for the remainder of his life. This book focuses on Hardy's remarkable achievements as a novelist. Although Victorian readers considered some of his works controversial, his novels remained highly regarded. His novels still appear in the syllabi of courses in Victorian literature and the British novel, as well as courses in feminist/gender studies, environmental studies, and other topics. For scholars, students, and the general reader, this companion helps to makes Hardy's novels accessible by providing a detailed biography of Hardy, plot summaries of each novel, and analyses of the critical contexts surrounding them. Entries focus on the people, cultural forces, literary forms, and movements that influenced Hardy's novels. The companion also suggests approaches for original interpretations and suggestions for further study.

Thomas Hardy in Context
Thomas Hardy in Context

Author: Phillip Mallett

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-03-18

Total Pages: 569

ISBN-13: 0521196485

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book covers the range of Thomas Hardy's works while providing a comprehensive introduction to his life and times.

The Withered Arm
The Withered Arm

Author: Thomas Hardy

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2016-03-03

Total Pages: 64

ISBN-13: 0241251613

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

'She bared her poor curst arm' A jealous lover's curse and an ingenious party trick feature in these two suspenseful stories set in Hardy's imaginary Wessex. One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

Thomas Hardy and the Folk Horror Tradition
Thomas Hardy and the Folk Horror Tradition

Author: Alan G. Smith

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2023-05-04

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1501384007

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Thomas Hardy and the Folk Horror Tradition takes the uncanny and unsettling fiction of Thomas Hardy as fundamental in examining the lineage of 'Hardyan Folk Horror'. Hardy's novels and his short fiction often delve into a world of folklore and what was, for Hardy the recent past. Hardy's Wessex plays out tensions between the rational and irrational, the pagan and the Christian, the past and the 'enlightened' future. Examining these tensions in Hardy's life and his work provides a foundation for exploring the themes that develop in the latter half of the 20th century and again in the 21st century into a definable genre, folk horror. This study analyses the subduing function of heritage drama via analysis of adaptations of Hardy's work to this financially lucrative film market. This is a market in which the inclusion of the weird and the eerie does not fit with the construction of a past and its function in creating a nostalgia of a safe and idyllic picture of England's rural past. However, there are some lesser-known adaptations from the 1970s that sit alongside the unholy trinity of folk horror: the adaptation for television of the Wessex Tales. From a consideration of the epistemological fissure that characterize Hardy's world, the book draws parallels between then and now and the manifestation of writing on conceptual borders. Through this comparative analysis, Thomas Hardy and the Folk Horror Tradition posits that we currently exist on a moment of fracture, when tradition sits as a seductive threat.

Folklore, Literature, and Cultural Theory
Folklore, Literature, and Cultural Theory

Author: Cathy L. Preston

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-23

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1317942965

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

First published in 1996. The need to write, particularly in pre-technological recording days, in order to preserve and to analyze, lies at the heart of folklore and yet to write means to change the medium in which much folk communication and art actually took and takes place. In Part I of the collection, the contributors address literary constructions of traditional and emergent cultures, those of Leslie Marmon Silko, Sandra Cisneros, Pat Mora, Carmen Tafolla, Julio Cortázar, Milan Kundera, Franz Kafka, Philip Roth, Thomas Hardy, and Dacia Maraini. The contributors to Part II of the collection offer readings of a variety of traditional, vernacular, and local performances.

Perception, Class and Environment in the Works of Thomas Hardy
Perception, Class and Environment in the Works of Thomas Hardy

Author: Roger Ebbatson

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-09-28

Total Pages: 155

ISBN-13: 3031401107

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book examines Thomas Hardy’s writing in both prose and poetry, focusing on issues of perception, ‘being’, class and environment. It illustrates the ways in which Hardy represents a social world which serves as a ‘horizon’ for the individual and explores the dialectic between the perceptible world and human consciousness. Ebbatson demonstrates how, in Hardy’s oeuvre, modern life becomes alienated from its roots in rural life – individual freedom is achieved in works like Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure or The Woodlanders at the cost of personal insecurity and a deepening sense of homelessness. However, this development occurs against the marginalisation of dialect forms of speech. This book also explores how Hardy’s impressionist vision serves to undermine the prevailing conventions of plot structure.