Public domain photograph of Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

A selective list of online literary criticism on Thomas Hardy, favoring signed articles by recognized scholars, articles published in reviewed sources, and web sites that adhere to the MLA Guidelines for Authors of Web Sites

Main Page | History of the Novel | 19th-C Literature | 19th-C Novel | About LiteraryHistory.com

Introduction & Lighter Reading

"Thomas Hardy." Hardy's style, techniques, themes, and the cultural and historical context. Victorian Web, ed. George Landow.

Very brief introduction to Thomas Hardy from the Academy of American Poets.

Thomas, Jane. A substantial introduction to Thomas Hardy from the Literary Encyclopedia, 17 July 2001 [subscription service].

Introduction to Thomas Hardy's war poetry, a study guide for undergraduates. Universal Teacher, ed. Andrew Moore.

A study guide for Thomas Hardy's poetry contains 2-3 paragraph discussions of the following poems: The Going of the Battery, Drummer Hodge, The Man He Killed, Channel Firing, In Time of The Breaking of Nations, The Going, The Haunter, The Voice, During Wind and Rain, The Darkling Thrush, Shut Out That Moon, To an Unborn Pauper Child, The Oxen, Afterwards. Universal Teacher, ed. Andrew Moore.

"Thomas Hardy abandoned his career as a novelist because he was hurt by harsh reviews of Jude the Obscure, letters to be auctioned at Sotheby's have revealed." News article in the Independent, (London), 9 Oct. 2001 by Anna Whitney.

The Thomas Hardy Association provides some free material for non-members.

Literary Criticism

Armstrong, Tim. A chapter from Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History, Memory (Palgrave 2000). "Thomas Hardy’s poetry, like his life, is full of secrets."

Austin, Linda M. "Reading Depression in Hardy's Poems of 1912-13." On Hardy's Poems of 1912-13 as a sequential response to mourning. Victorian Poetry 36 (Spring 1998) [first page of article only, blurred].

Ferguson, Susan L. "Drawing fictional lines: dialect and narrative in the Victorian novel." On the uses of dialect in Hardy's novels and those of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Walter Scott, and others. Style, Spring 1998.

Grossman, Julie. "Hardy's Tess and 'The Photograph': images to die for." Criticism, Fall 1993.

Heptonstall, Geoffrey. A review of Thomas Hardy: A Literary Life by James Gibson. Contemporary Review, Sept. 1996.

Kreilkamp, Ivan. "Pitying the Sheep in Far from the Madding Crowd. Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2009 [first page of article only].

Longo, Mary Ann Tighe. "Dysfunctional families and determinism in the fiction of Thomas Hardy." Dissertation, 1993, U of Nebraska. Lincoln.

Plotz, John. Motion sickness: spectacle and circulation in Thomas Hardy's "On the Western Circuit." Studies in Short Fiction, Summer 1996.

Shrimpton, Nicholas. "'Lane, You're a Perfect Pessimist': Pessimism and the English Fin de siècle" [and Arthur Schopenhauer]. Influence of Schopenhauer's philosophy of pessimism on Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman, Byron, and others. Yearbook of English Studies, 2007.

Shumaker, Jeanette Roberts Abjection and degeneration in Thomas Hardy's "Barbara of the House of Grebe." College Literature, Spring 1999.

Main Page | History of the Novel | 19th-C Literature | 19th-C Novel | About LiteraryHistory.com

1998-2011 by Jan Pridmore