Thomas Hardy and Desire

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

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2. Introduction — Thomas Hardy and Desire: Conceptions of the Self

   • Jane Thomas

   Pages 1-14

3. House and Home: Nostalgic Desire and the Locus of Being

   • Jane Thomas

   Pages 15-40

4. Desire, Female Amity and Sapphic Space

   • Jane Thomas

   Pages 41-70

5. Sexual Desire and the Lure of the Erotic

   • Jane Thomas

   Pages 71-94

6. Poor Men and Ladies: Aspirational Desire

   • Jane Thomas

   Pages 95-118

7. As You Like It: Cross-Dressing and the Gendered Expression of Desire

   • Jane Thomas

   Pages 119-143

8. Art, Aesthetics and Masculine Desire: The Well-Beloved (1897)

   • Jane Thomas

   Pages 144-163

9. ‘Scanned Across the Dark Space’: Poetry, Desire and Aesthetic Fulfilment

   • Jane Thomas

   Pages 164-191

10. Back Matter

    Pages 192-233

    PDF

Drawing on a broad concept of desire, informed by poststructuralist theorists this book examines the range of Hardy's work. It demonstrates the sustained nature of his thinking about desire, its relationship to the social and symbolic network in which human subjectivity is constituted and art's potential to offer fulfilment to the desiring subject.

• aesthetics
• poetry
• Thomas Hardy

"Jane Thomas has provided us with the most thoroughgoing study of Hardy and desire since J. Hillis Miller's four decades ago, and offers a wonderfully panoramic approach to the subject. Thomas uses Lacan, Butler and other thinkers, always in an approachable manner, to meditate on the fleeting, obscure and unstable nature of desire in Hardy's texts, extracting a surprising range of reference - from the impossibility of nostalgia to the sharpness of desire across class divisions; from the pleasures of cross-dressing to Sapphic desire seen as a kind of utopian space. The study ranges with assurance across Hardy's corpus, and is illuminating on both the major and minor novels and the poetry." Professor Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

''Thomas's finely articulated chapters serves to take the argument forward, with exemplary attention to textual evidence and an impressive grasp of ideas . . . this is a book which makes a notable contribution to Hardy studies and one whose argument will doubtless generate further fruitful debate.'' Hardy Journal

"In offering a persuasive analysis of Hardy's art as an exercise and expression of (often frustrated or foiled) desire, Jane Thomas has made an outstanding contribution to Hardy studies." J. B. Bullen, Victorian Studies

• University of Hull, UK

  Jane Thomas

JANE THOMAS is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Hull, UK, and has published widely on Thomas Hardy, Victorian Literature, art and sculpture and contemporary women writers. Her publications include Thomas Hardy, Femininity and Dissent: Reassessing the 'Minor' Novels and editions of The Well-Beloved and Hardy's shorter fiction.

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