Reading Hardy's Landscapes [Hardcover]

Reading Hardy's Landscapes locates the essential energy of the novels in the descriptive details as much as in the story. The emphasis is on the author's habits of vision and imagination. It is instinctive in Hardy to locate his tales between the huge abstractions of time and space and the minute particularities of nature - a leaf, a minnow, a gnat. His human dramas unfold in a landscape and are part of that landscape, caught up in larger patterns of movement and change.List of Illustrations Preface Reference and Abbreviations Introduction Hardy's Insects Noises in Hardy's Novels The Poetry of Motion Erosion, Deformation and Reformation Concatenations 'This Insubstantial Pageant' Notes Index

'...an eloquent, heartfelt appreciation of Thomas Hardy by a critic intimately familiar with the whole Hardy corpus.' - English Language Teaching

MICHAEL IRWIN is Professor of English at the University of Kent, which he first joined as lecturer in 1967. He had previously worked at the Catholic University of Lublin, at the University of Tokyo, at the University of L?dz and at Smith College. His chief academic interest has been in fiction, and particularly in matters of fictional technique. His work in this area includes Henry Fielding: the Tentative Realist and Picturing: Description and Illusion in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. For many years he has taught at Kent a specialized course on the work of Thomas Hardy. He has published two novels, Working Orders and Striker, and has translated numerous opera libretti - usually for Kent Opera in the first instance - and a variety of lieder and cabaret songs.