Thomas Hardy and Desire: Conceptions of the Self [Hardcover]

Drawing on a broad concept of desire, informed by poststructuralist theorists this book examines the range of Hardy's work. It demonstrates the sustained nature of his thinking about desire, its relationship to the social and symbolic network in which human subjectivity is constituted and art's potential to offer fulfilment to the desiring subject.Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: Hardy and Desire House and Home: Nostalgic Desire and the Locus of the Self Desire, Female Amity and 'Sapphic Space' Sexual Desire and the Lure' of the Erotic Poor Men and Ladies: Aspirational Desire As You Like It: Cross-Dressing and the Gendered Expression of Desire Art, Aesthetics and Masculine Desire 'Scanned Across the Dark Space':Poetry, Desire and Aesthetic Fulfilment Notes Bibliography Index

Jane Thomas has provided us with the most thoroughgoing study of Hardy and desire since J. Hillis Miller's four decades ago, and offers a wonderfully panoramic approach to the subject. Thomas uses Lacan, Butler and other thinkers, always in an approachable manner, to meditate on the fleeting, obscure and unstable nature of desire in Hardy's texts, extracting a surprising range of reference - from the impossibility of nostalgia to the sharpness of desire across class divisions; from the pleasures of cross-dressing to Sapphic desire seen as a kind of utopian space. The study ranges with assurance across Hardy's corpus, and is illuminating on both the major and minor novels and the poetry. Professor Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

''Thomas's finely articulated chapters serves to take the argument forward, with exemplary attention to textual evidence and an impressive grasp of ideas . . . this is a book which makes a notable contribution to Hardy studies and one whose argument will doubtless generate further fruitful debate.'' Hardy Journal

In offering a persuasive analysis of Hardy's art as an exercise and exl3¬