Hardy's Literary Language and Victorian Philology [Hardcover]

This pioneering study is the first detailed exploration of Hardy's linguistic awkwardness, a subject that has long puzzled critics. Dennis Taylor 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. In what is the first major treatment of a writer's relation to theOxford EnglishDictionary, Taylor's study also examines the influence on Hardy's language of the founding and development of this period of theOED.

The most probing contemporary critic of Hardy's verse...Taylor's immensely provocative book is filled with passing insights that amply fulfil its aim of locating Hardy's literary language within the problematics of Victorian linguistic scholarship. --English Literature in Transition

Through Hardy we look at language and meaning differently, but only after Taylor's book do we have a full sense of what that crucial difference entails. --Victorian Studies