Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication

Letters, Telegrams and Postal Systems
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-3-319-29101-7
Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buch, Englisch, 246 Seiten, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 216 mm, Gewicht: 4401 g

This book explores the relationship between Thomas Hardy’s works and Victorian media and technologies of communication – especially the penny post and the telegraph. Through its close analysis of letters, telegrams, and hand-delivered notes in Hardy’s novels, short stories, and poems, it ties together a wide range of subjects: technological and infrastructural developments; material culture; individual subjectivity and the construction of identity; the relationship between private experience and social conventions; and the new narrative possibilities suggested by modern modes of communication.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Koehler, Karin

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Einzelne Autoren: Monographien & Biographien
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften Mediengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments.- List of Abbreviations.- Introduction: ‘A Modern Wessex of the penny post’.- 1. ‘The speaking age is passing away, to make room for the writing age’: From Oral Tradition to Written Culture.- 2. ‘Inconvenient old letters’: Letters and Privacy in Hardy’s Fiction.- 3. ‘A more material existence than her own’: Epistolary Selves in Hardy’s Fiction.- 4. ‘Never so nice in your real presence as you are in your letters’: Letters and Desire in Jude the Obscure . 5.‘A Story of to-day’: Hardy’s Postal Plots.- 6. ‘Unopened and forgotten’: Letters from the Margins.- 7. Epistolary Ghosts: Letters in Hardy’s Poems and Shorter Fictions.- Conclusion, or the Profitable Reading of Letters.- Notes.- Bibliography.- Index.-

Über Autor(innen)

Karin Koehler is Teaching and Research Assistant at the University of St Andrews, UK, where she pursued her award-winning doctoral research. She has taught on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature at three Scottish Universities, while researching representations of media, technologies, and networks of communication in Victorian and modernist prose and poetry.