“The 1980s witnessed radical advances in the theorisation of the study of literature in the universities. It had begun in France in the 1960s and it made a large impact on the higher education establishments of Britain and America. New… — 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… — Geoffrey Harvey Copy Share Image
“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… — Geoffrey Harvey Copy Share Image
“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… — Geoffrey Harvey Copy Share Image
“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… — Geoffrey Harvey Copy Share Image
“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
