Abstract
Reading fiction and reading literary criticism are endeavours in common. In themselves, the two kinds of reading lead to quite dissimilar emotional and intellectual reactions, but the reactions support each other. Which of the two is the primary activity is obvious; but the importance of the secondary activity is attested by the evolution of novelists’ reputations — and in a firm sense their readability — in pace with developments in literary criticism. Of course not every change in literary criticism affects every author’s reputation in an even fashion. But understanding one novel in a fresh way often shakes our accustomed perceptions of other novels — especially those by the same author.
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Notes
Edmund Wilson, ‘Dickens: The Two Scrooges’, The Wound and the Bow (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941);
Albert J. Guerard, Thomas Hardy: The Novels and Stories (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949).
An essay which may have helped prepare readers for Guerard’s book was Morton Dauwen Zabel’s ‘Hardy in Defense of his Art: The Aesthetic of Incongruity’ in Southern Review, vi (1940),125 – 49;
Rev. and rpt. in Zabel’s Craft and Character in Modern Fiction (New York: Viking, 1957) PP. 70–96.
J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (London: Oxford University Press; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970);
Perry Meisel, Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Repressed (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972);
Allan Brick, ‘Paradise and Consciousness in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, NCF, xvii (1962), 115–34;
Roy Morrell, Thomas Hardy: The Will and the Way (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1965);
Bert Hornback, The Metaphor of Chance: Vision and Technique in the Works of Thomas Hardy (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1971);
Jeannette King, Tragedy in the Victorian Novel: Theory and Practice in the Novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Henry James (Cambridge, England, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978);
Lois Deacon and Terry Coleman, Providence and Mr. Hardy (London: Hutchinson, 1966);
J. O. Bailey, ‘Ancestral Voices in Jude the Obscure’, in The Classic British Novel, ed. Howard M. Harper, Jr., and Charles Edge (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972) pp. 143–65;
Robert Gittings, Young Thomas Hardy (1975) and The Older Hardy (1978) (London: Heinemann; Boston: Little, Brown);
The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, Vol. I: 1840–1892, ed. Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978);
J. T. Laird, The Shaping of ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975);
J. I. M. Stewart, Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography (London: Longman, 1971);
Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (London: The Bodley Head; New York: Random House, 1971);
David DeLaura, ‘“The Ache of Modernism” in Hardy’s Later Novels’, ELH, xxxiv (1967), 380–99.
Stanley E. Fish, ‘Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics’, in Self Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1972) p. 406.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘The Structural Study of Myth’ (1955)
Structural Anthropology trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (1963; rpt. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1967) pp. 202–28; Roland Barthes, ‘Myth Today’ (1957)
in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972) pp. 109–58; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977).
The Literary Notes of Thomas Hardy, Vol. I, ed. Lennart A. Björk (Göteborg, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgcnsis, 1974).
The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard H. Taylor (London: Macmillan, 1979).
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© 1979 Dale Kramer
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Kramer, D. (1979). Making Approaches to Hardy. In: Kramer, D. (eds) Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-03780-3_1
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