The Life of Thomas Hardy (Blackwell Critical Biographies) - Hardcover

Turner, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0631168818 ISBN 13: 9780631168812

Verlag: Blackwell Publishers, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

Thomas Hardy's professional career was a triumph of self-help. Born the son of a village stonemason and a cook, he made himself the best-known English author of his day. He began with a course of self-education. Leaving school at sixteen, he taught himself Greek, and read Greek and Latin poetry between five and eight every morning, before walking three miles to work in an architect's office. His private life was less unusual. Like most people, Hardy had problems with sex, money, health, morale, marital and social relationships, ageing, and bereavement. Outwardly uneventful, his personal life was interesting chiefly as raw material for his writings. Other material came from his extensive and varied reading, not least in classical literature, which Paul Turner, himself a classicist, shows to have played a key part in Hardy's work as both novelist and poet. The profound influence upon Hardy, not only of Greek and Roman epic, Greek tragedy (and a late Greek novel), but also of Shakespeare, Milton and the Victorian poets, figures prominently here, as too does the literary value for him of his practical knowledge of music. Turner's strikingly original and penetrating account of Hardy's extraordinarily creative life and longevity offers a series of thirty-two chapters, each of which relates the biographical and literary background of a single work.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Paul D.L. Turner, Emeritus Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford, read Classics and English at Cambridge University, and was formerly a University Lecturer in English at Oxford University. He contributed Victorian Poetry, Drama, and Miscellaneous Prose 1832-1890 to the Oxford History of English Literature, and his many other publications include translations of Daphnis and Chloe, Lucian's Satirical and Thomas More's Utopia.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Thomas Hardy's professional career was a triumph of self-help. Born the son of a village stonemason and a cook, he made himself the best-known English author of his day. He began with a course of self-education. Leaving school at sixteen, he taught himself Greek, and read Greek and Latin poetry between five and eight every morning, before walking three miles to work in an architect's office.

His private life was less unusual. Like most people, Hardy had problems with sex, money, health, morale, marital and social relationships, ageing, and bereavement. Outwardly uneventful, his personal life was interesting chiefly as raw material for his writings. Other material came from his extensive and varied reading, not least in classical literature, which Paul Turner, himself a classicist, shows to have played a key part in Hardy's work as both novelist and poet. The profound influence upon Hardy, not only of Greek and Roman epic, Greek tragedy (and a late Greek novel), but also of Shakespeare, Milton and the Victorian poets, figures prominently here, as too does the literary value for him of his practical knowledge of music.

Turner's strikingly original and penetrating account of Hardy's extraordinarily creative life and longevity offers a series of thirty-two chapters, each of which relates the biographical and literary background of a single work.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Blackwell Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1998
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0631168818
• ISBN 13: 9780631168812
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar