Hardy S Landscape Revisited

Examining a wide range of representations of physical, metaphorical, and dream landscapes in Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, Eithne Henson explores the way in which gender attitudes are expressed, both in descriptions of landscape as the human body and in ideas of nature. Henson discusses the influence of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, particularly on Brontë and Eliot, and argues that Ruskinian aesthetics, Darwinism, and other scientific preoccupations of an industrializing economy, changed constructions of landscape in the later nineteenth century. Henson examines the conventions of reading landscape, including the implied expectations of the reader, the question of the gendered narrator, how place defines the kind of action and characters in the novels, the importance of landscape in creating mood, the pastoral as a moral marker for readers, and the influence of changing aesthetic theory on the implied painterly models that the three authors reproduce in their work. She also considers how each writer defines the concept of Englishness against an internal or colonial Other. Alongside these concerns, Henson interrogates the ancient trope that equates woman with nature, and the effect of comparing women to natural objects or offering them as objects of the male gaze, typically to diminish or control them. Informed by close readings, Henson's study offers an original approach to the significances of landscape in the 'realist' nineteenth-century novel.

This book proposes that a Hardy novel should be read very much as a Constable painting is 'read' - the landscape as significant as the figures who traverse it, the background as important as the story. It analyses the recurring emphases and implications in Hardy's innumerable descriptions of birds, plants, insects, light, weather, sound, movement. The ephemeral lives of his human protagonists are seen to be half dissolved in the ceaseless patterns of motion, change and dissolution in the teeming world they inhabit. Hardy emerges as no mere story-teller, in the nineteenth-century tradition, but as a poet and a modernist who dramatizes a vision, a way of seeing and understanding the world. So far from being - as has often been claimed - an unsophisticated writer, he is a supremely coherent artist whose work everywhere shows the shaping power of his idiosyncratic habit of imagination.

This volume, produced in honour of Professor David A. Hinton’s contribution to medieval studies, re-visits the sites, archaeologists and questions which have been central to the archaeology of medieval southern England. Contributions are focused on the medieval period (from the Anglo-Saxon period to the Reformation) in southern England.

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.

The classic novel adaptation has long been regarded as a staple of "quality" television. Adaptation Revisited offers a critical reappraisal of this prolific and popular genre, as well as bringing new material into the broader field of Television Studies. The first part of the book surveys the more traditional discourses about adaptation, unearthing the unspoken assumptions and common misconceptions that underlie them. In the second half of the book, the author examines four major British serials: "Brideshead Revisited", "Pride and Prejudice", "Moll Flanders", and "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall".

"Hardy was a landscape novelist, who painted enduring pictures of a real outdoor world that formed the stage upon which his characters lived out their tragic lives. Incorporating extracts from Hardy's poems and novels such as Return of the Native, Far From the Madding Crowd and Under the Greenwood Tree, this book consists of a series of walks through Hardy's landscapes. It allows the reader to appreciate not only the beauty and wonder of the natural world but also the unique contribution that Thomas Hardy has made to our ability to interpret that world. Hardy's landscapes are at once specific and general; based on real places and scenes, but purposefully distanced and disguised. The author argues that Hardy's Wessex is actually a very narrow territory and in doing so he calls into question a number of accepted identifications of Wessex locations and proposes new ones. Follow in the footsteps of Jude, Tess and Clym and live and breathe the very essence of Thomas Hardy's world."--Publisher's description.