NEW ASSESSMENT OF ENGLISH NOVELIST
AND POET THOMAS HARDY SHOWS LASTING APPEAL 

	CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., Feb. 14 -- The influential English
novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, who helped forge a link between the
19th and 20th century literary traditions, is enjoying a renewed
appeal with today's readers and critics as yet another century
approaches, a University of Virginia English professor says in a new
study called "Thomas Hardy in Our Time," published by St. Martin's
Press.
	Because Hardy, author of such classic novels as "Tess of the
d'Urbervilles" and "The Return of the Native," wrote often about
women characters and with considerable insight, he is of growing
interest to contemporary feminist approaches to literature, says
Robert Langbaum, the James Branch Cabell Professor of English and
American Literature.
	And because Hardy criticized the social mores of his own
late-Victorian era and was groundbreaking in his criticism of what
he saw as stifling aspects of the institution of marriage and
conventional views of sexuality, he is drawing the attention of
politically radical readers and critics a century later. Langbaum,
author of numerous important studies of 19th and 20th century
literature, ranks Hardy among the foremost English novelists,
finding him still "a commanding presence in our time."
	Langbaum shows how Hardy, though his novels may seem
"Victorian" with well-made plots, was the main influence on D.H.
Lawrence's revolutionary writing about sexuality and the unconscious
mind in the 20th century.  Lawrence was in many ways "rewriting
Hardy as way of arriving at his own novels," Langbaum says, adding
that "Hardy's psychological insights into the unconscious and
sexuality seem contemporary with Lawrence's" though they appeared a
generation earlier.
	And although Hardy is best known for his novels, Langbaum,
in this new assessment, also rates him among "major" English poets.
Because many of today's poets and critics have gone back to Hardy as
a reaction against the great modernist poets Yeats, Eliot and Pound
who followed him, Hardy has seemed in comparison to these modernist
giants an important but minor poet.  Langbaum grants that Hardy
unassumingly wrote many expertly-crafted, memorable minor poems --
among them the often anthologized "Darkling Thrush" and "Neutral
Tones" -- but he wrote so many major poems -- such as
"Transformations," "During Wind and Rain," "Wessex Heights" and the
1912-13 elegies -- as to be considered a major poet.
	In poetry, too, he was a link to the modern period.  Hardy,
most of whose poetry was written in the early 20th century,
"modernized and transmitted to the 20th century what was usable in
19th century poetry," Langbaum says.  But he adds, in a boldly
original judgment, that Hardy's poetry "in its largest scale" is to
be found in the great novels.
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February 13, 1995
	For additional information or interviews Robert Langbaum may
be reached at (804) 296-6781.