The Expressive Eye: Fiction and Perception in the Work of Thomas Hardy

by J.B. Bullen

Each of Thomas Hardy's novels is filled with striking visual images -- characters, interior settings, buildings, village scenes, and open tracts of land. These images are all rendered with a vitality and energy immediately recognizable as Hardy's own. In fact, Hardy, whose style owed much to his abilities as a draughtsman, once remarked that he saw his narratives as a series of images. J. B. Bullen explores this fascinating link between the image and the idea in the fiction of Thomas Hardy, and demonstrates how Hardy approached his work from a particular "point of view" which not only determined the lighting, composition, and structure of his literary visual effects, but which also allowed him to express emotions and ideas in the direct, "vividly visible" fashion that is the hallmark of his greatest fiction.

304 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1986

Reviews

[sarah]

Going to go back through this in more detail later, but it had a lof of interesting ideas about how Hardy tied art concepts into his writing.

[Eleni · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's particular focus was not the direction I want to go, but a very detailed reading of the novels in relation to references to works of art, portraiture, contemporary artists, and Hardy's notebooks.