NOW ON CD ROM
- THE LIFE AND WORK OF THOMAS HARDY
- ALLUSIONS AND ANNOTATIONS
- BY
- MARTIN RAY
- 2003
FEATURING: Hardy’s many allusions in the Life to the work of other writers. For instance, there are some eight or nine allusions to Robert Browning’s poetry which the modern reader is unrealistically expected to recognize: few readers now would readily identify the source of "mountainous fugues" or "wronged great soul of an ancient master", yet Hardy obviously assumed that in his own day readers would accept without suspicion that even Florence Hardy, the book’s nominal author, would have a thorough familiarity with the Victorian poet and a facile ability to quote an apposite phrase.
Other writers to whom Hardy alludes include favourites such as Shelley, Wordsworth, Milton, Tennyson, Swinburne, Byron and Keats – Shakespeare, of course, features prominently, as do Latin and Greek literature (especially Horace), along with a dozen references to the Bible.