Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication

Karin Koehler is Teaching and Research Assistant at the University of St Andrews, UK, where she pursued her award-winning doctoral research. She has taught on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature at three Scottish Universities, while researching representations of media, technologies, and networks of communication in Victorian and modernist prose and poetry.

“Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication: Letters, Telegrams and Postal Systems stakes out new ground by bringing together two venerable topics in Hardy criticism … . Through insightful readings of Hardy's novels, short stories, and poems, she shows that the influence of postal and other networks on his body of work is a subject as worthy of attention as other, more thoroughly explored, topics on this list.” (Aaron Worth, Victorian Studies, Vol. 60 (3), 2018)​“Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication will be a profitable study for scholars interested in the cultural minutia of Hardy’s work.” (Annette R. Federico, English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, Vol. 61 (2), 2018)“In Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication, Karin Koehler draws our attention to how much still remains to be uncovered regarding the function of letters and written communication in Hardy’s fiction … . Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication is a far-ranging and commanding investigation of its titular concerns, and it deserves a wide readership.” (James Green, The British Society for Literature and Science, bsls.ac.uk, September, 2017) “Koehler’s study is not limited to considering methods of communication, such as the letters, telegrams and postal systems of her title. Throughout Thomas Hardy and Communication: Letters, Telegrams and Postal Systems, her study of Hardy’s concern with new modes of communication is artfully woven into a study of developments in the form of the novel. … her study offers a thorough and persuasively argued exploration of the centrality of letter writing to Hardy’s modernist exploration of human relationships.” (Trish Ferguson, Review of English Studies, June, 2017)“This new book constitutes a judicious, timely and innovatively conceived intervention in the field of Hardy studies. Karin Koehler succeeds, with real critical verve and originality, in shedding a fertile and absorbing light on these familiar Hardy texts, and her book can be highly recommended not only to students of his work but to all with an interest in the cultural questions pertaining to communication and text in the Victorian period.” (Roger Ebbatson, Review of English Studies, 2017)

• Acknowledgments.- List of Abbreviations.- Introduction: ‘A Modern Wessex of the penny post’.- 1. ‘The speaking age is passing away, to make room for the writing age’: From Oral Tradition to Written Culture.- 2. ‘Inconvenient old letters’: Letters and Privacy in Hardy’s Fiction.- 3. ‘A more material existence than her own’: Epistolary Selves in Hardy’s Fiction.- 4. ‘Never so nice in your real presence as you are in your letters’: Letters and Desire in Jude the Obscure. 5.‘A Story of to-day’: Hardy’s Postal Plots.- 6. ‘Unopened and forgotten’: Letters from the Margins.- 7. Epistolary Ghosts: Letters in Hardy’s Poems and Shorter Fictions.- Conclusion, or the Profitable Reading of Letters.- Notes.- Bibliography.- Index.-