Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate

Robin Chamberlain is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.

This collection of essays pays tribute to the work of Michael Millgate,
professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, who is recognized as
the world’s top Hardy scholar.

The 15 eminent Hardy scholars who contributed to the volume take a
variety of approaches to Hardy’s work. Mary Rimmer explores the
productive combination of sacred and secular allusions in Hardy’s
writing. Dennis Taylor reconstructs Hardy’s process of reading and
rereading Hamlet, and discusses the influence of this reading on his own
writing. U.C. Knoepflmacher considers Hardy’s subversive depictions of
childhood, while Marjorie Garson delves into Hardy’s use of stone
motifs. Simon Gatrell discusses the iconography of clothing in Hardy’s
writing. Ruth Bernard Yeazell provides a fresh reading of Hardy’s
realism. J. Hillis Miller examines Hardy’s use of the compulsion to
return home as a means of investigating the relationship between the
individual and the community. George Levine looks at the influence of
Darwinian thought on Hardy’s portrayal of alienation in the midst of
community. William W. Morgan’s “Aesthetics and Thematics in
Hardy’s Volumes of Verse: The Example of Time’s Laughing-stocks”
suggests that we read this volume of verse as a unified book. Samuel
Hynes reads Hardy as a war poet, while Norman Page focuses on the
openings of Hardy’s poems.

The last essay in the volume, W.J. Keith’s biographical and
contextual “Thomas Hardy and the Powyses,” considers Hardy’s
influence as an inspiration to younger writers, and is, therefore, an
appropriate ending to this excellent new book of Hardy criticism.