| ... The most successful part
of the book , and the section most likely to appeal to
readers of VPR, focuses on the periodical publication of
Hardy's short stories. Graham Law's "Neither Tales nor
Short Stories?: Issues of Authorship, Readership, and
Publishing in A Group of Noble Dames" opens with a useful
distinction between the Victorian-era tale and the short
story theorized by the American educator Brander Matthews
during the mid-1880s. Within this context, Law examines
Hardy's negotiations to suit the six core "Noble Dame"
stories to the tamer editorial and market expectations for
the Christmas number of the Graphic in 1890. Since the
four tales Hardy later added to the volume edition A
Group of Noble Dames do not exhibit such
sanitization, Law concludes that the "collection is
fractured by the unsettled and unsettling development from
traditional 'tale' to modern 'short story'" (26). In this
way, Law identifies Hardy as a transitional figure in the
development of British short fiction, much as his longer
fictions have been cited as transitional examples of the
British novel. ... Matthew Badura, Review in Victorian Periodicals Review 51:1 (Spring 2018) |
| Thomas Hardy's Short
Stories: New Perspectives is divided into four
sections. In the first, on 'Periodical Publication',
Graham Law traces the evolution of A Group of
Noble Dames, including the six narratives
initially written for the Graphic, and four
stories revised from earlier publications and added
for the volume edition. As with Tess, also
first serialised in the Graphic, the changes
were rarely as simple as bowdlerisation for the
magazine and then the restoration of omitted material
for the volume, and Law discusses the various orders
of revision with admirable clarity and dispatch. He
also proposes that taken as a whole the volume shares
'modernist concerns through its materialist thematics
of sexuality and gender' (26), and in doing so sits
somewhere between the traditional tale and the modern
short story. This part of the argument is, however,
less clear. ... Phillip Mallett, Review in Hardy Society Journal 14:1 (Spring 2018) |