“Hardy classified A Pair of Blue Eyes among ‘Romances and Fantasies’. A favourite of Tennyson, its melancholy treatment of youth, love and death is expressive of late nineteenth-century susceptibilities. Not unnaturally in an early novel, Hardy draws freely on his… — Geoffrey Harvey Copy Share Image
“Hardy classified A Pair of Blue Eyes among ‘Romances and Fantasies’. A favourite of Tennyson, its melancholy treatment of youth, love and death is… — Geoffrey Harvey Copy Share Image
“In his Preface to the 1892 edition of Tess of the d’Urbervilles Hardy warns the reader that ‘a novel is an impression, not an argument’. However, the text offers several explanations of Tess’s tragedy; social, psychological, hereditary, and fatalistic, all of which proceed from the assumption that Hardy’s text is in some sense determined, and that the character of Tess… — Geoffrey Harvey Copy Share
“Extremely self-conscious in its craft, in many ways The Hand of Ethelberta is an exploration of fiction as illusion, which involves parody of the conventions it employs; romance, melodrama and farce, and a rejection of realism for absurdist and surrealistic effects. The ‘hand’ of Ethelberta is an obvious, ironic allusion to courtship, and the sub-title, ‘A Comedy in Chapters’, suggests… — Geoffrey Harvey Copy Share
“Hardy’s poetry is pre-eminently about ways of seeing. This is evident in the numerous angles of vision he employs in so many poems. Sometimes it involves creating a picture, as in ‘Snow in the Suburbs’, which allows the eye to follow the cascading snow set off by a sparrow alighting on a tree; or it employs the camera effect, as… — Geoffrey Harvey Copy Share
“An important dimension of Tess of the d’Urbervilles is its debt to the oral tradition; to stories about wronged milkmaids, tales of superstition, and stories of love, betrayal and revenge, involving stock figures. This gives Tess of the d’Urbervilles an anti-realistic inflection. From the world of ballad and folktale Hardy draws such fateful coincidences as the failure of Angel to… — Geoffrey Harvey Copy Share
“Hardy’s astonishing technical versatility has won the admiration of major poets from Ezra Pound and Cecil Day Lewis to Philip Larkin. Among other genres… — Geoffrey Harvey Copy Share Image
“However, for Hardy the possibility of poetry’s traditional function of transcendence remains, but in a more limited form. In Hardy’s work the poet transcends… — Geoffrey Harvey Copy Share Image
“The ideology of liberal humanism found expression in the earliest reviews of Hardy’s writing and remained a dominant force until the explosion of literary… — Geoffrey Harvey Copy Share Image
“A turning point in the criticism of Hardy’s poetry came in his centenary year, in which W. H. Auden (1940) recorded his indebtedness to… — Geoffrey Harvey Copy Share Image
“The setting, concerns, and mood of The Woodlanders are consonant with the Wessex of the earlier novels. There is an element of nostalgia in… — Geoffrey Harvey Copy Share Image
“Insisting that his writing did not offer a philosophy of life, Hardy claims that each poem was an ‘impression’, intensely subjective and evanescent.” — Geoffrey Harvey Copy Share Image
“Tess is not simply presented as a passive victim, however. Throughout the novel she is shown as experiencing tension between the intractable materiality of… — Geoffrey Harvey Copy Share Image
