Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate

329 Pages·2006·1.67 MB·English

by  Keith Wilson

THOMAS HARDY REAPPRAISED:
ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF MICHAEL MILLGATE
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EDITED BY KEITH WILSON
Thomas Hardy Reappraised:
Essays in Honour of
Michael Millgate
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2006
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-3955-2
ISBN-10: 0-8020-3955-3
Printed on acid-free paper
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Thomas Hardy reappraised : essays in honour of Michael
Millgate / edited by Keith Wilson.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8020-3955-3
1. Hardy, Thomas, 1840–1928 – Criticism and interpretation.
I. Millgate, Michael II. Wilson, Keith (Keith G.)
PR4754.T495 2006 823.8 C2005-907375-6
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to
its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the
Ontario Arts Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for
its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction by Keith Wilson ix
1 The Gospel According to Hardy 3
pamela dalziel
2 ‘My Scripture Manner’: Reading Hardy’s Biblical and
Liturgical Allusion 20
mary rimmer
3 Hardy and Hamlet 38
dennis taylor
4 Literary Allusion: Hardy and Other Poets 55
barbara hardy
5 Hardy’s Subterranean Child 78
u.c. knoepflmacher
6 Written in Stone: Hardy’s Grotesque Sublime 96
marjorie garson
7 The Erotics of Dress in A Pair of Blue Eyes 118
simon gatrell
8 Hardy’s Rural Painting of the Dutch School 136
ruth bernard yeazelL
vi Contents
9 Individual and Community in The Return of the Native:
A Reappraisal 154
j. hillis miller
10 The Woodlanders and the Darwinian Grotesque 174
GEORGELEVINE
11 Plato and the Love Goddess: Paganism in Two Versions
ofThe Well-Beloved 199
jeremy v. steele
12 Aesthetics and Thematics in Hardy’s Volumes of Verse:
The Example of Time’s Laughingstocks 219
william w. morgan
13 Hardy and the Battle God 245
samuel hynes
14 Opening Time: Hardy’s Poetic Thresholds 262
norman page
15 Thomas Hardy and the Powyses 270
w.j. keith
Selected Checklist of Hardy-Related Publications by Michael Millgate 287
Notes on Contributors 291
Index 297
Acknowledgments
My main thanks go to the authors of these essays, all of whom re-
sponded with such warmth and enthusiasm to the invitation to express
in this way their appreciation for Michael Millgate’s contributions to
Hardy studies. Pamela Dalziel in particular was a firm and wise sup-
porter of this project from its inception and I thank her for her assis-
tance in bringing it to fruition. I am grateful also to the generous
support provided by the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ottawa and
the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto. At Ottawa,
Antoni Lewkowicz, former Associate Dean of Arts (Research), and
David Rampton, Chair of English, provided invaluable assistance, as
did Brian Corman, Chair of English at the University of Toronto, and I
am greatly indebted to all three. I also thank my colleagues Ina Ferris
and April London for, as always, their sage advice. Jill McConkey of the
University of Toronto Press helped at every stage of this book’s advance
to publication and I am most indebted to her, as I am to Barb Porter for
her work as editor. Miriam Skey was an exemplary copy-editor, and I
am very grateful to her.
Keith Wilson
Ottawa
February 2006
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Introduction
keith wilson
This collection of new essays written by fifteen of the world’s most
eminent Hardy scholars in honour of Michael Millgate, University Pro-
fessor of English Emeritus at the University of Toronto, offers in the
frequency with which his name is invoked in its bibliographical cita-
tions graphic testimony to the magnitude of his contribution to the
study of the life and work of Thomas Hardy. Most of the textual, critical,
and biographical resources that these essays take for granted as an
essential context for serious discussion of Hardy’s work did not exist
when Michael Millgate began his career as a Hardy scholar. The fact
that they do now owes much to his remarkable contributions to the
field. His first book on Hardy, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist
(1971), an exceptionally acute reading of all the novels enabled by
extensive familiarity with the biographical, historical, and archival back-
ground (and a seemingly instinctive feel for what can most produc-
tively be made of it), is still in print, nearly thirty-five years after its
initial publication. His Thomas Hardy: A Biography (1982; recently re-
vised as Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited, 2004) is the most authori-
tative life – meticulously researched, temperate, and unerring in its
capacity to relate documentable fact to plausible speculation without
any confusion between the two. His seven-volume edition, coedited
with Richard Little Purdy, of the Collected Letters (1978–88) is one of the
great scholarly editions of literary correspondence, a sign of its accom-
plishment being the frequency with which its authority is cited in sale
catalogues, and the corresponding infrequency with which a dealer can
experience the pleasure of being able to annotate one of his offerings
‘Not in Millgate and Purdy.’ Recoverer of Hardy’s intended text for The
Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (1985), editor of Letters of Emma and