Geoffrey Harvey

“Hardy classified A Pair of Blue Eyes among ‘Romances and Fantasies’. A favourite of Tennyson, its melancholy treatment of youth, love and…

— Geoffrey Harvey

“In his Preface to the 1892 edition of Tess of the d’Urbervilles Hardy warns the reader that ‘a novel is an impression,…

— Geoffrey Harvey

“Extremely self-conscious in its craft, in many ways The Hand of Ethelberta is an exploration of fiction as illusion, which involves parody…

— Geoffrey Harvey

“Hardy’s poetry is pre-eminently about ways of seeing. This is evident in the numerous angles of vision he employs in so many…

— Geoffrey Harvey

“An important dimension of Tess of the d’Urbervilles is its debt to the oral tradition; to stories about wronged milkmaids, tales of…

— Geoffrey Harvey

“Hardy’s astonishing technical versatility has won the admiration of major poets from Ezra Pound and Cecil Day Lewis to Philip Larkin. Among…

— Geoffrey Harvey

“However, for Hardy the possibility of poetry’s traditional function of transcendence remains, but in a more limited form. In Hardy’s work the…

— Geoffrey Harvey

“The ideology of liberal humanism found expression in the earliest reviews of Hardy’s writing and remained a dominant force until the explosion…

— Geoffrey Harvey

“A turning point in the criticism of Hardy’s poetry came in his centenary year, in which W. H. Auden (1940) recorded his…

— Geoffrey Harvey

“The setting, concerns, and mood of The Woodlanders are consonant with the Wessex of the earlier novels. There is an element of…

— Geoffrey Harvey

“Insisting that his writing did not offer a philosophy of life, Hardy claims that each poem was an ‘impression’, intensely subjective and…

— Geoffrey Harvey

“Tess is not simply presented as a passive victim, however. Throughout the novel she is shown as experiencing tension between the intractable…

— Geoffrey Harvey

“The 1980s witnessed radical advances in the theorisation of the study of literature in the universities. It had begun in France in…

— Geoffrey Harvey