Criticism in Focus: Thomas Hardy by Charles Lock (review)

162 LEITERS IN CANADA 1992 the interest of capitalist publishing,' could be sought by authors too, as Feltes shows it was? In particular, the shift from outright purchase of copyright to payment by royalties deserves much fuller treatment than it receives, since it was the chief means by which writers could be made to feel that they shared in the publishers' ventures. Finally, since the theory is explicitly Marxist, what are (or have been or ought to have been) the alternatives to the dominance of capital over the production of novels? Will they order this matter better under the dictatorship of the proletariat ? While we are waiting to find out, we can be grateful to Feltes for having so forcefully demonstrated the fundamental and pervasive importance of its economic base for the writing of fiction in the Victorian period. . (PETER ALLEN) Charles Lock. Criticis111 in Focus: Thomas Hardy St Martin's Press 1992. 138 The Criticism in Focus series is designed, as advertised, to guide readers' first approach to scholarly work on an author. In the case of Thomas Hardy, this is a formidable task, and one that Charles Lock has carried out most effectively in a lively contribution to the series. After.a clearly focused introduction in which he suggests that Hardy's popularity in the schools has excused Hardy from much current critical debate, Lock begins with an account of Hardy's personal view of the art of fiction (chapter 1), continues with some of the early attempts to assess Hardy's overall achievement (chapter 2), then goes on to early twentieth-century views (chapter 3), and concludes, very strongly, with 'critical strategies' of the last fifty years (chapter 4). It is in chapters 1 and 2 that Lock demonstrates how far into the well of Hardy studies he has dipped, for here, around an illuminating comparison of the careers of Hardy and James, he builds an interesting account of the work of Lionel Johnson, Annie Macdonell (sometimes Lock spells it Macdonnell), Joseph Warren Beach, Samuel Chew, and other pre-First World War scholars (including authors of numerous books on the topography of Wessex) who sought to 'sum up' the value of Hardy's overall accomplishment, particularly in fiction. Though the sheer mass of material surveyed in these chapters forces Lock at times simply to provide lists of titles, his selections are guided always by clear awareness of both the history of Hardy criticism and the history of criticism itself. We are fortunate to have in Lock an astute student of both still in possession of his sense of humour: The most recent literary criticism, taking its bearings from Barthes, Foucault, Lacan or Derrida, is embarrassed by any notion of /tors lexte: what is not actually HUMANITIES 163 written is merely encoded in other semiotic systems. And a reading of Hardy that explained agricultural and rural circumstances in terms of wage contracts and deeds of sale and leaseholds and other documents would be quite acceptable .... There are enough contracts and messages and letters and texts ... to plot any thesis of the circulation of discourse, and enough missing or undelivered letters to satisfy any appetite for absent signifiers. In chapters 3 and 4 - in an astonishing fifty pages or so - Lock treats not just the response to Hardy of Lawrence, Woolf, Raymond Williams, Leavis, Auden, and others, but also of that wave of academic critics who first found voice in the Southern Review (1940) and continue to give voice to the present moment, Lock among them. Though Lock is uncharacteristically obtuse in his view that feminist, unlike Marxist, thought refuses to recognize the human tragedy and therefore 'locates all oppression and misery ... in the deliberate organization of society by those who benefit from it,' his typically sensitive touch returns as he guides us through the work of the most influential post-1940 critics: Albert J. Guerard, Irving Howe, Tony Tanner, J. Hillis Miller, Michael Millgate, and others. Lock might have said more about the enormous contribution of Michael Millgate, who, both as critic (Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist [1971]) and as scholar (Thomas Hardy: A Biography [1982], and with RL. Purdy the Collected Letters [1978--88]), is...