Hardy's Literary Language and Victorian Philology is the first detailed exploration of Hardy's linguistic `awkwardness', a subject that has long puzzled critics. Dennis Taylor's pioneering study shows that Hardy's language must be understood as a distinctive response to the philological and literary issues of his time. Deeply influenced by the Victorian historical study of language, Hardy deliberately incorporated into his own writing a sense of language's recent and hidden history, its multiple stages and classes, and its arbitrary motivations. Indeed, Taylor argues, Hardy provides an example of how a writer `purifies the dialect of the tribe' by inclusiveness, by heterogeniety, and by a sense of history which distinguishes Hardy from a more ahistorical, synchronic modernist aesthetic and which constitutes an ongoing challenge to literary language. In what is the first major treatment of a writer's relation to the Oxford English Dictionary, the author also examines the influence on Hardy's language of the founding and development in this period of the OED.
This is the first detailed exploration of Hardy's linguistic `awkwardness', a subject that has long puzzled critics. Dennis Taylor's pioneering study shows that Hardy's language must be understood as a distinctive response to the philological and literary issues of his time, in particular the founding and compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary.
