The Historian of ‘Wessex’: The Folk Background and Provenance of Some of Thomas Hardy’s Short Stories

Authors

  • David Cornelius Independent Scholar.

Keywords:

Folkloristics, Literary, Thomas Hardy,

Abstract

This article surveys the young Thomas Hardy's immersion in the oral tales of his local community, including echoes of the traumatic events of the Napoleonic Wars. It is then the complex and poignant links between passions, circumstances, hopes and decisions which form those striking moments which are at the core of story. That many such stories could be linked to specific locations, or to still-living protagonists, underscored their importance. Hardy presented himself as an historian of this community, and later was able to use the genre of the short story, in its late-Victorian context, to capture well this by-then vanishing oral tradition.

Author Biography

David Cornelius, Independent Scholar.

Coffs Harbour, NSW 2450.

References

Bold, A. and R. Giddings, Who was Really Who in Fiction (Harlow, Essex: Longman Group UK Limited, 1987).

Brooks, J.R., Thomas Hardy: The Poetic Structure (New York: Cornell University Press, 1971).

Brown, D., Thomas Hardy (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1961).

Coppard, A.E., ‘On First Getting Into Print’, Colophon, Part VI (May, 1931).

Davidson, D., ‘The Traditional Basis of Thomas Hardy's Fiction’, The Southern Review, VI, (Summer 1940), p. 168.

Dalziel, P., (ed.), Thomas Hardy: The Excluded and Collaborative Stories (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).

Firor, R.A., Folkways in Thomas Hardy (New York: A. S. Barnes & Company Inc., 1962).

O’Connor, Frank, The Lonely Voice (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Co., 1963).

Guerard, A.J., Thomas Hardy: The Novels and the Stories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949).

Gibson, J., (ed.), The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan London Ltd., 1976).

Green, D.B., ‘A source of Hardy's ‘The Duchess of Hamptonshire’’. Notes and Queries, New Series III, (February 1956).

Hardy, E., (ed.), Hardy's Notebooks and Some Letters from Julia Augusta Martin (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955).

Hardy, E., ‘Plots of Five Unpublished Short Stories’, The London Magazine VII (Nov. 1958).

Hardy E. and F. B. Pinion (eds.), One Rare Fair Woman: Thomas Hardy’s Letters to Florence Henniker, 1893-1922 (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1972).

Hardy, F.E., The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840-1928 (London: The Macmillan Press, 1972).

Hardy, T., Wessex Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Hardy T., A Group of Noble Dames.

Howe, I., Thomas Hardy (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1968).

Little, G., Approach to Literature (Sydney: Science Press, 1963).

Millgate, M., Thomas Hardy: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).

O’Connor, Frank, The Lonely Voice (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Co., 1963).

Orel, H., (ed.), Thomas Hardy's Personal Writings.

Orel, H., The Victorian Short Story: Development and Triumph of a Literary Genre (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

Pinion, F.B., A Hardy Companion.

Pinion, F.B., ‘Hardy and Scott’, Thomas Hardy Journal, (February 1994).

Purdy, R.L. and M. Millgate, (eds.), The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978-88).

Ray, M., Thomas Hardy: The Textual Study of the Short Stories (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1997).

Sandison, H., ‘An Elizabethan Basis for a Hardy Tale?’, PMLA, 52 (1939).

Schweik, R., ‘The Modernity' of Hardy's Jude the Obscure’, in Phillip V. Mallett and R. P. Draper, A Spacious Vision: Essays on Hardy (Newmill: The Patten Press, 1994).

Scott, J.F., ‘Thomas Hardy's Use of the Gothic: An Examination of Five Representative Works,’ Nineteenth Century Fiction, XVII (March 1963), 363-380.

Seymour-Smith, M., Hardy (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1995).

Southerington, F.R., Hardy's Vision of Man (London: Chatto and Windus).

Stephens Cox, J., ‘Monographs on the Life, Times and Works of Thomas Hardy’.

Sumner, R., Thomas Hardy: Psychological Novelist (New York: St Martin's Press, 1981).

Thurley, G., The Psychology of Hardy's Novels: The Nervous and the Statuesque (St Lucia, Qld: The University of Queensland Press, 1975).

Weber, C.J., ‘An Elizabethan Basis for a Hardy Tale?: An Addendum’ PMLA, LVI, 2 (June 1941).

Williams, M., Thomas Hardy and Rural England (London: Macmillan, 1972).

Wu, D., (ed.), A Companion to Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).

Downloads

Published

2010-11-05

Issue

Vol. 25 (2010): A Celebratory Issue

Section

International and Comparative Studies

License

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. Copyright of items in their Australian Folklore format, and any associated fees (e.g.CAL), remains the property of the Association. This includes making articles freely available on the journal's website. 
  2. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g. in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
  3. Authors are welcome to archive their pre-print and post-print pdf copies of their articles under the SHERPA RoMEO 'Green' copyright classification.
  4. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g. publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.