1st Edition
Ecstatic Sound' Music and Individuality in the Work of Thomas Hardy
By John Hughes
Copyright 2001
256 Pages
by
Routledge
256 Pages
by
Routledge
256 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
This book studies the ways Hardy writes about music, and argues that this focus allows for a close and varied investigation of the affective dimensions of his poetry and fiction, and his recurrent preoccupations with time, community and love. Throughout his work Hardy associates music with moments of individual expression and relatedness. For him, music provokes a response to life that is... Read more
Contents: Introduction; ’Souls unreconciled to life’; ’Those unaccountable sensations’; ’The beats of being’; ’Till time seemed fiction’; ’Let every man make a philosophy for himself out of his own experience’; Bibliography: Index.
Biography
John Hughes
'Hughes's ability to balance theory and textual analysis is a particular strength of this elegantly written and suggestive study, which is informed by an impressive synthesis of material from various disciplines. Recommended for upper-division undergraduates and above.' Choice 'Ecstatic Sound offers the Hardy reader a series of remarkable new insights in its lively attentiveness to the text, its engagement with and resistance to critical orthodoxy and its genuinely original method of a theorised re-reading.' English '... a distinguished addition to the ever-increasing specialized critiques of Hardy's many-sided work... Hughes' detailed survey of both fiction and poetry, each given two long chapters, is richly suggestive, while in a final chapter his discussion of aesthetic, psychological and philosophical contexts, the latter chiefly involving Bergson and Deleuze, deepens understanding of Hardy's creativity.' English Studies
