This volume presents the work of Barbara Hardy's essays encompassing 19th and 20th centuries British fiction, poetry, and Shakespeare. It also presents a short biography of her and an extensive bibliography of her work.
Part I: The Work of Barbara Hardy 1. Introduction 2. A New Voice in Criticism: The Early Work of Barbara Hardy Part II: The Art of Narrative 3. The Shakespearean Nights of Robert Louis Stevenson 4. Wilkie Collins’s Basil: A Story of Modern Life: An Author’s Search for an Appropriate form 5. The absent Dog: Great Expectations 6. Moments of Suspension in Dickens 7. Hamlet’s Revenge; or, Mr Q Strikes Back 8. The Mill on the Floss and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 9. Scenes of Reading Romola Part III: The Art of Poetry 10. Aesthetics, Visuality and Feelings in the Natural Theology of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Alice Meynell 11. The Wanderings of Yeats and Oisin 12. Poetry and Magic; or, Thinking through Form and Feeling; or, the Uses of Unpleasure Part IV: Writing Women and Children 13. Misogyny on Trial: Shakespeare and Honour Killing 14. Jeanie Deans and Narrative Method in The Heart of Mid-Lothian 15. Abjection and the Nineteenth-Century Novel: When is a Human Not a Human? 16. The Image of Childhood in George Eliot’s the Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner 17. Tellers and Listeners: The Narrative Imagination of Carol Shields Part V: Fictions 18. Eleanor Mear’s Tea Party 19. The Tailor’s Dummy 20. A Short Biography 21. A Primary and Secondary Bibliography 1948–2012
