Thomas Hardy's Short Stories: New Perspectives by Juliette Berning Schaefer and Siobhan Craft Brownson

Reviewed by: Thomas Hardy's Short Stories: New Perspectives by Juliette Berning Schaefer and Siobhan Craft Brownson Matthew Badura (bio) Juliette Berning Schaefer and Siobhan Craft Brownson, eds., Thomas Hardy's Short Stories: New Perspectives ( New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 200, $140/ £110 cloth. Most critical attention to Thomas Hardy's fiction has understandably focused on the novels, which remain fascinating examples of traditional realist technique employed for non-traditional social critique. Thomas Hardy's Short Stories: New Perspectives, edited by Juliette Berning Schaefer and Siobhan Craft Brownson, is the first edited collection devoted to Hardy's short fiction. It aims to "refresh readers' sense of Hardy's professionalism in all the genres he practiced, and to show that he evolved as a practitioner of the long and short fictional forms at the same time" (7). Divided into four parts—"Periodical Publication," "Gender Relationships," "Community Relationships," and "Narrative Technique"—this volume does an admirable job of placing Hardy's short fiction in conversation with historicist, gender, and narrative theories while remaining accessible to beginning scholars of Hardy. The most successful part of the book, and the section most likely to appeal to readers of VPR, focuses on the periodical publication of Hardy's short stories. Graham Law's "Neither Tales nor Short Stories?: Issues of Authorship, Readership, and Publishing in A Group of Noble Dames" opens with a useful distinction between the Victorian-era tale and the short story theorized by the American educator Brander Matthews during the mid-1880s. Within this context, Law examines Hardy's negotiations to suit the six core "Noble Dame" stories to the tamer editorial and market expectations for the Christmas number of the Graphic in 1890. Since the four tales Hardy later added to the volume edition A Group of Noble Dames do not exhibit such sanitization, Law concludes that the "collection is fractured by the unsettled and unsettling development from traditional 'tale' to modern 'short story'" (26). In this way, Law identifies Hardy as a transitional figure in the development of British short fiction, much as his longer fictions have been cited as transitional examples of the British novel. Siobhan Craft Brownson's "'Moonlight nights': Hardy, Christmas and the Illustrated London News" features a useful history of Christmas print culture in periodicals such as the Graphic, Saturday Review, English Illustrated Magazine, Illustrated London News, and Harper's. Brownson's essay discusses "What the Shepherd Saw" and "The Son's Veto," which were published in the Christmas numbers of the Illustrated London News in 1881 and 1891, respectively. By taking a long view of Christmas culture, Hardy's publishing career, and these particular stories, Brownson argues that "Hardy could satisfy editorial needs yet still reshape audience expectations [End Page 205] of their Christmas literature because the holiday was subject to the same instability in its identity formation as was the short story genre of the day" (47). Any collection on Hardy would be remiss to ignore gender, and Part II of this collection offers three essays with distinct approaches to the topic. Suzanne J. Flynn's "'Getting life-leased at all cost': Marriage in Hardy's Late Short Stories" places Hardy in conversation with Mona Caird and other late Victorian feminists. Flynn argues that because novel plots traditionally conclude in marriage, Hardy's short stories "provided a sort of proving ground for his more controversial ideas about both marriage and family," including some of his most potent dissections of loveless marriages and the potentially constricting effects of biological birth (65). Moving from an historical to a highly theoretical approach to gender, Deborah Manion's "Pregnant by a Portrait: The Dynamics of Desire for Hardy's 'Imaginative Woman'" makes a case for the fluidity of Hardy's short fiction in relation to feminist film and image theory. Arguing that Hardy's "An Imaginative Woman" presents the reader with a "focalized account of a cinesthetic subject," Manion claims that "Hardy anticipates feminist models of visual pleasure not formally theorized until nearly a century later by scholars such as Laura Mulvey, Miriam Hansen, and Vivian Sobchack" (69, 68). Part II concludes with Karin Koehler's "'Imaginative sentiment': Love, Letters, and Literacy in Thomas Hardy's Shorter Fiction...

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.