Overview
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.
Full Product Details
Author: Karin Koehler
Publisher: Springer International Publishing AG
Imprint: Springer International Publishing AG
Edition: Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2016
Dimensions:
Width: 14.80cm
, Height: 1.40cm
, Length: 21.00cm
Weight: 0.454kg
ISBN: 9783319804903
ISBN 10: 3319804901
Pages: 246
Publication Date: 30 May 2018
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Reviews
Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication will be a profitable study for scholars interested in the cultural minutia of Hardy's work. (Annette R. Federico, English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, Vol. 61 (2), 2018) In Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication, Karin Koehler draws our attention to how much still remains to be uncovered regarding the function of letters and written communication in Hardy's fiction ... . Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication is a far-ranging and commanding investigation of its titular concerns, and it deserves a wide readership. (James Green, The British Society for Literature and Science, bsls.ac.uk, September, 2017) Koehler's study is not limited to considering methods of communication, such as the letters, telegrams and postal systems of her title. Throughout Thomas Hardy and Communication: Letters, Telegrams and Postal Systems, her study of Hardy's concern with new modes of communication is artfully woven into a study of developments in the form of the novel. ... her study offers a thorough and persuasively argued exploration of the centrality of letter writing to Hardy's modernist exploration of human relationships. (Trish Ferguson, Review of English Studies, June, 2017) This new book constitutes a judicious, timely and innovatively conceived intervention in the field of Hardy studies. Karin Koehler succeeds, with real critical verve and originality, in shedding a fertile and absorbing light on these familiar Hardy texts, and her book can be highly recommended not only to students of his work but to all with an interest in the cultural questions pertaining to communication and text in the Victorian period. (Roger Ebbatson, Review of English Studies, 2017) In Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication, Karin Koehler draws our attention to how much still remains to be uncovered regarding the function of letters and written communication in Hardy's fiction ... . Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication is a far-ranging and commanding investigation of its titular concerns, and it deserves a wide readership. (James Green, The British Society for Literature and Science, bsls.ac.uk, September, 2017)
Author Information
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.
