Thomas Hardy – Journal of Victorian Culture Online

Sexualizing Narratives: Layered Scopophilia in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and the Female Reader

August 12, 2022 Therese Ruud Gordeladze Other

Header image: 1891 illustration from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, by Joseph Syddall. “Why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus,” comments the narrator of Tess of the d’Urbervilles following Tess Durbeyfield’s fateful encounter with Alec d’Urbervilles at the Chase.[1] The exploration of sexuality within Victorian culture and literature, especially female sexuality, is extensive; Michel Foucault’s first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976), Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987), Christopher

JVC issue 27.1 is now available!

April 26, 2022 Elly McCausland Published in JVC

Anyone who’s read, or seen the latest adaptation of, Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life will remember the hapless Irish maid, Bridget, accused in an early scene of being ‘brought up in a field’. As Catherine Healy explores in her Prize Winning essay in this issue, Ethnic Jokes: Mocking the Working Irish Woman, ‘Bridget’ is a stock comic figure of the nineteenth-century press, appearing liberally in English, Irish and American light journalism. Healy’s essay extends and deepens the explorations pioneered in

Anna West, Thomas Hardy’s Sheep

July 5, 2016 lucinda matthews-jones Other

Anna West is an early career researcher in English literature. She recently completed her doctorate at the University of St Andrews, where she was a recipient of a Macpherson scholarship and the Rutherford prize. Her first monograph, Thomas Hardy and Animals, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2017. Follow her on twitter: @a_west19. This post accompanies her JVC article ‘“Rot the Genuine”: Moral Responsibility and Far from the Madding Crowd’s Cancelled Fragment’, which can be downloaded here.

Laura Fox Gill, Review: The Hardy Way: A 19th-Century Pilgrimage, Margaret Marande

October 23, 2015 lucinda matthews-jones Book Reviews, Published in JVC, Victorians Beyond the Academy, Victorians in Film, Victorians on Display

Laura Fox Gill, University of Sussex Laura Fox Gill is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Sussex. Her research investigates the influence of John Milton on nineteenth-century culture (painting, poetry, and prose) and she is soon to begin work on connections between the thought and writing of Milton and Thomas Hardy. She tweets at @kitsunetsukiki. Walking for Thomas Hardy was a complicated matter; never simply a way of getting from A to B . Though his novels

Karen Laird, Film Review: Far From the Madding Crowd

July 20, 2015 lucinda matthews-jones Published in JVC, Victorians in Film

Karen Laird’s book The Art of Adapting Victorian Literature, 1849–1920 will be published in August 2015 by Ashgate Press. Follow her latest updates on Twitter @drkarenlaird. Far from the Madding Crowd was first adapted for film in 1915 by the British studio Turner Pictures. Reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic saw it as a lukewarm effort save for the lead performance by Florence Turner (known early in her phenomenal career as simply “The Vitagraph Girl”). One critic praised Turner’s

Avoiding those Madding Crowds: Date Night with Thomas Hardy

April 16, 2013 fong Other

Ryan D. Fong Kalamazoo College For most of our readership across the United States and in the UK, April is proving to be a very cruel month indeed—with severe weather patterns and cold fronts marching across the North America and Atlantic. In these frigid days and dank nights, in which we grow ever wearier of these lingering and intemperate climes, what is a good Victorianist to do? The options would seem (at least to this Victorianist) to either sink into