This paper ranges widely to track of the evolution of Hardy's view on love and marriage, and analyzes two reasons why this unique view developed: one is Nature; another is Time.

Proposing that Thomas Hardy's fiction exhibits strong Gothic sensibilities which offer insight into his artistic vision and add to the power of his fiction, creating a new form of the Gothic, a Victorian Gothic, this dissertation reassesses the Gothic strains in Hardy's fiction. The dissertation is in eight chapters: (1) Introduction to Hardy's…

Intended for college teachers and students of English literature and bibliography, this paper presents a chronology of Victorian poet Robert Browning's life as he wrote the four-volume "murder poem,""The Ring and the Book." The paper begins with Browning's discovery in a Florentine bookstall of "the old yellow book,"…

Thomas Hardy has received great acclaim as a poet and novelist, but his short stories have remained largely ignored with regard to the usual short story "canon." Early reviews of Hardy's stories were mixed, but after his death the tide of critical opinion tended to turn against Hardy's stories. A significant historical factor was the…

Considers the issue of literary canons, raised in the context of a week-long series of lectures and discussions on "the Victorians" in an Elderhostel program, with participants for whom these texts were the product of their parents' generation and of their own childhood reading. Raises substantive questions about the meaning of a…

This paper examines how the attitudes toward Victorian literature have changed through the years. After a brief introductory section, the paper presents a chronological bibliography of 44 general and specific anthologies dealing with Victorian literature, followed by detailed annotations for eight anthologies. Next, some observations of the shift…

A literature course entitled "The Victorian Illustrated Book: A Marriage of Image and Word," offered at Skidmore College in New York, was designed to help students make connections between art and literature. Based on the premise that illustrations in Victorian books can be "decoded" much like a written text, students were…