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Book Reviews Two on Hardy Charles P. C. Pettit, ed. Reading Thomas Hardy. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. xiii + 268 pp. $65.00 Julie Sherrick. Thomas Hardy's Major Novels: An Annotated Bibliography . Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998. xiv + 195 pp. $36.00 READING THOMAS HARDY brings together twelve lectures by some leading Hardy scholars at the Twelfth International Conference of the Thomas Hardy Society in Dorchester in the summer of 1996, the third such collection edited by Charles P. C. Pettit. In his preface, Pettit claims the essays are "eminently readable," accessible to all students and lovers of Hardy, and indeed there is very little academic pretentiousness in the book as a whole. The straightforwardness of the essays, which often retain the teacherly, audience-conscience tone of the original lectures, is one of the merits of the collection. This friendliness, though, tends to be at the cost of any startling new readings or fresh angles , almost as if the fear of overreading or distorting "good little Thomas Hardy" has kept the authors from taking off in new directions or pushing the limits of interpretation. The authors seem to have agreed to ignore , for the moment, postmodern literary theories in their various approaches to Hardy's oeuvre—you will not find much evidence of contributions made by feminist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, or social materialist critics of Hardy, for example. It must be said, though, that the complete absence of theoretical jargon contributed to my enjoyment in reading many of the essays, and I found the undisguised affection and admiration of these established critics for Hardy's life and work very refreshing . Three of my favorite essays in the book deal with well-worn subjects for Hardy scholars: erotic love, tragedy, and time. These essays offer no groundbreaking insights, and don't really much bother to acknowledge, incorporate, or refute the works of other Hardy scholars on these themes. But the attitude of each writer toward his subject, his personal stake, almost, in understanding Hardy's feelings (one mustn't say his views, for if there is a common thread running throughout this book it is Hardy's claim that his novels offered no philosophy, but only a "series of 317 ELT 42 : 3 1999 seemings"—virtually every essay reasserts this) reminded me of my own stake in reading Hardy, and of why I was drawn to his novels in the first place. Michael Irwin's "From Fascination to Listlessness: Hardy's Depiction of Love" argues eloquently that readers who become impatient with Hardy's "immature" view of love miss the whole point of his painful dramatizations of fascination, desire, and disappointment. To read him too literally is a mistake, says Irwin, for Hardy's aim is not simply to tell a story, but to show "what falling in love is like." "Hardy's presentation of love is wonderfully adept at making us experience, or remember, the transforming power of passion," he writes. "To read [Hardy's] accounts of love literally and censoriously, with a 'mean unglamoured eye,' is scarcely to read them at all." Similarly, Raymond Chapman wishes to correct critics who tend simplistically to compare Hardy's novels with Greek tragedy; such comparisons "do little justice to Hardy's originality as a tragic writer. He cannot be dismissed as an imitator of past writers, or assigned to a particular school or clear definition of tragedy." Hardy certainly employs some of the elements of classical tragedy, but for Chapman he differs importantly from much twentieth-century writing in his unfailing compassion : "He gently touches the reader's personal shadow and strengthens endurance. Life is to some extent for all, and preponderantly for some, a matter of damage limitation." Although the subject of tragedy in Hardy has been gone over thoroughly by a great many critics, Chapman's article invites further meditation on the different nature of tragedy for Victorians and modernists. In his essay on "Hardy and Time," Phillip Mallett asks whether time in Hardy's novels is pointing forward, towards Darwinian perfection and progress, or backwards, towards the death of the sun and the "exhaustion of life energy." Mallett's conclusions are not unexpected or complex . But his...

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