By Sophie Gilmartin

This severe examine of Hardy's brief tales presents an intensive account of the ruling preoccupations and recurrent writing techniques of his whole corpus in addition to supplying certain readings of a number of person texts. It relates the formal offerings imposed on Hardy as contributor to Blackwood's Magazine and different periodicals to the equipment he hired to encode in fiction his stricken perspective in the direction of the social politics of the West state, the place lots of the tales are set. No earlier feedback has proven how the robust demanding situations to the reader fastened in Hardy's later tales show the complexity of his motivations in the course of a interval whilst he was once relocating steadily towards replacing fiction for poetry.

Features

*The in basic terms ebook to supply entire feedback of Hardy's whole output of brief stories.

*The provision of super complete, tremendous exact, shut readings of a few key tales complements the book's popularity as a possible instructing resource.

*Draws at the paintings of social historians to clarify the history of social and political unrest in Dorset that's partially exposed and in part hidden in Hardy's portrayals of his fictional Wessex.

*Offers attention-grabbing insights into Hardy's near-obsession in his mature part with the wedding agreement, and with its criminal binding of erratic males and women.

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Additional info for Thomas Hardy's Shorter Fiction: A Critical Study

Example text

When the body is brought in, it is referred to as a ‘corpse’, a ‘burden’, a ‘dead man’. ’ (106) that the corpse suddenly becomes someone’s child – still unnamed, as he has been throughout the story – but now related, part of the tale and an individual who was very young, vulnerable and who suffered injustice. In ‘The Winters and the Palmleys’ the physical details of the hanging witnessed by Hardy’s father are adhered to: young Jack Winter was so boyish and slim that they were obliged in mercy to hang him in the heaviest fetters kept in the jail, lest his heft should not break his neck, and they weighed so upon him that he could hardly drag himself to the drop.

A Tradition’ begins with the frame narrator, who introduces Selby, and Selby includes in his tale the fascinating storytelling powers of his soldier uncle, Job. ‘The Melancholy Hussar’ is related by a narrator who, in his boyhood, listened to Phyllis Grove tell her story exclusively to him. The romance of her tale rests partly on her Desdemona-like enthralment by the stories of another solider, Matthäus Tina of the York Hussars. Hardy emulates the process of oral transmission in written form in these stories.

Perhaps it was these which had revealed her trysts to her father. (63) Hardy’s novels and short stories often follow or view people as they walk: from Gaymead to London, as does Sam in ‘The Fiddler of the Reels’; to Talbothays, as does Tess, glimpsed from a bird’s-eye view as she walks across a large expanse of downland, appearing ‘like a fly on a billiardtable’; along the endlessly long Long-Ash Lane, as does Marty South from The Woodlanders, and characters from ‘Interlopers at the Knap’; into Casterbridge, as do Elizabeth-Jane and her mother.

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