Victorian Pastoral: Tennyson, Hardy and the Subversion of Forms - Hardcover

Schur, Owen

9780814204832: Victorian Pastoral: Tennyson, Hardy and the Subversion of Forms

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081420483X ISBN 13: 9780814204832

Publisher: Ohio State University Press, 1990

"Victorian pastoral" explores the pastoral poetry of Alfred Tennyson and Thomas Hardy as a way of understanding each poet's relation to the literary past. This exploration of Tennyson's and Hardy's response to and reshaping of a specific genre aims to shed light on each poet's relation to modernist poetics. Owen Schur also presents an overview of the pastoral tradition, suggesting the importance of rhetoric and the play of language to a full understanding of the genre. Using deconstructionist methodology, with its emphasis on the indeterminacy and potentially subversive nature of all rhetorical systems, Schur offers readings of Tennyson and Hardy poems, some of which fall outside the boundaries of the conventional definitions of pastoral, and places them within the context of the pastoral tradition and literary history. These aim to demonstrate both poets' sense of exclusion from the discourse of pastoral tradition. Further, Schur aims to establish these kinds of pastoral poetry as a foreshadowing of modernist poetics. With Tennyson and Hardy, Victorian pastoral becomes modern pastoral, suggesting that the two poets are key figures in the transformation of 19th century poetics into modernism.

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