Haunted Hardy Poetry, History, Memory

by Armstrong, Tim

• ISBN13: 9780333597910
• ISBN10: 0333597915
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-01-13
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Hardy was a poet of ghosts. In his poetry he describes himself as posthumous; as rekindling the cinders of passion; as the guardian of the dead forgotten by history; and as haunted by ghosts, particularly the specter of the lost child (as in the rumor that he fathered a child in the 1860s). Using Derrida, Abraham, and Torok and other theorists, and referring to Victorian debates on materialism, this book investigates ghostliness, historicity, and memory in Hardy's poetry.

Author Biography

Tim Armstrong is Reader in Modern English and American Literature, University of London.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vii
List of Abbreviations	viii
Introduction	1	(7)
Supplementarity	8	(22)
Poetry as afterlife	10	(6)
Typology and syntax	16	(7)
Latency	23	(7)
The Ghosts of Thought	30	(32)
Haunted materialism	31	(7)
Series and selfhood in `The Pedigree'	38	(5)
`Ghost theory' versus fetishism	43	(8)
Language and psychical research	51	(7)
Coda: `The Photograph'	58	(4)
The Child in Time	62	(27)
`Family Portraits': haunting pain	65	(7)
Randy's hand, or the lost son	72	(7)
`A deed back in time'	79	(10)
The Politics of the Dead	89	(22)
`Hurt, misrepresented names'	90	(9)
Mute witnesses	99	(5)
The history of the same	104	(7)
History, Catastrophe, Typology	111	(23)
`The Convergence of the Twain': history as coincidence	112	(5)
Two solutions to the problem of agency	117	(4)
The construction of history	121	(6)
Zionism and typology	127	(7)
Mourning and Intertextuality	134	(39)
Cinders	134	(14)
Dantean purples	148	(8)
Crossed voices: dialogues with the dead	156	(17)
Notes	173	(19)
Index	192