Hardy: OUP's Context Series

ELT 47 : 2 2004 how wide and pervasive was Joyce's literary incorporation of medical lore and the biophysics of the body. His reading of Joyce may well open a new vestibule in the Joyce cottage industry. Gordon concludes his study with a reading of Thomas and Plath who—in the age of the X-ray, X-ray vision (vis-à -vis Superman), and the apotheosis of the medical profession—view the mind and body as cellular . Gordon argues Thomas and Plath employ metaphors of mitosis and metastasis to explain the evolution and growth of life, the inner life, and how life can go uncontrollably, wildly wrong. Thomas's work is the story "of the processes of physiology, conceived as the work of cells, determining psychology and narrative." As a student of Thomas, Plath, too, assumes that "inner derives from outer" and that "her physical self [is] conceived as an interior site whose hidden realities it is the poem's job to disclose." After a spectacular anatomy of Joyce, Gordon's study of Thomas and Plath pales a bit: but if it lacks the kind of elegant argument his study of Hopkins and Eliot offers or the erudition of detailed medical theories he shows underlying the works of Wordsworth or Dickens, it offers an elaborate reading of poetic tropes with an abundance of evidentiary materials. His discussion offers an original and convincing analysis of these difficult, esoteric poets. John Gordon's Physiology and the Literary Imagination: Romantic to Modern offers ground-breaking readings of major authors and serves as an exemplary study of how those authors represent the mind and imagination in physiological terms. His erudition in medical history, his close reading of literary texts, and his flashes of critical insight make the book original, fascinating, and convincing. While he avoids a summary conclusion that generalizes about "literary periods," Gordon's study of romantic, Victorian, and modern writers admirably displays how cultural history, medical theory, and literary arts converge in the career of major writers of their respective cultures. MARTIN BOCK ________________ University of Minnesota Duluth Hardy: OUP's Context Series Patricia Ingham. Thomas Hardy. Oxford World's Classics Authors in Context Series . New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. xxii + 263 pp. Paper $9.95 £6.99 PATRICIA INGHAM is General Editor of the new Oxford World's Classics Authors in Context Series. Her own contribution to that series is this succinct documented guide to the context of Thomas Hardy's life and work. It is divided into seven major parts, titled respectively "The 206 BOOK REVIEWS Life of Thomas Hardy," "The Fabric of Society," "The Literary Context," "Social Issues: Class in Hardy's Novels," "Social Issues: Women and Society ," "Hardy and Science: Space, Time, Evolution and the Human Race," "Religious Issues," and "Hardy Recontextualized." These are supplemented by twelve illustrations, by a chronology of events in Hardy's life and its historical background, by recommendations for further reading, by notes on relevant websites, and by a list of cinema and television adaptations of Hardy's novels. There is a certain repetitiousness in the way Ingham has organized her text. For example, her "The Life of Thomas Hardy" has a section headed "Social Class," including a sub-section on religion and its loss. Her next chapter, "The Fabric of Society," has an extended section headed "Social Class" (it includes two subsections on class, three on women in society, and three on religion); and that chapter is followed by chapters on "Class in Hardy's Novels," "Women and Society," and "Religious Issues" (italics mine). That recurrence of topics—class, religion, women—seems almost calculated to result in repetition: and sometimes it does. In "The Fabric of Society," for example, we are informed that "Maybold, the vicar in Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) is snobbishly ashamed of his infatuation with Fancy Day. . . ." and "Elfride Swancourt 's father in A Pair of Blue Eyes is described as a man with "a mind whose pleasures were taken amid genealogies, good dinners and patrician reminiscences." Then, in "Religious Issues," we get much the same thing again: "Maybold in Under the Greenwood Tree is somewhat snobbish ; and Swancourt in A Pair of Blue Eyes is even patrician...