This 1981 book suggests an insightful approach to Hardy as a poet and novelist. With the novels in particular it concentrates not so much on ideas and attitudes as on the texture of the writing, and on the crucial importance in it between one kind of exposition and another. John Bayley starts by establishing a difference between Hardy the private 'noticer' of things and people, and Hardy the professional author committed to interpreting these observations to his readers. The vital ingredients of eroticism and humour are analysed in detail, as are the unusual ways in which passiveness, 'pessimism', and anthropomorphism function in the poems and novels, and an insightful reading of Tess is put forward. Professor Bayley shows that the rewards of reading Hardy are greater than ever, although they are not necessarily those which the reader expects, or has been taught to look for.

A brief biographical study and critical introductions accompany a collection of shorter and lesser-known works that includes a novella, episodes from The Cossacks, short stories, autobiographical passages, and philosophical writings (view table of contents)

Product Description: A critical study of the individual tragedies by one of Britain's most eminent literary scholars.

Book by Bayley, John

Product Description: John Bayley's only novel explores the effect of `the first cold winter of peace' on a group of British servicemen stationed after the war in a small town on the Rhine.

Essays discuss Keats, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hardy, Pasternak, Rilke, Cezanne, Solzhenitsyn, Kundera, Brodsky and Auden

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A narrator whose gender is intentionally kept vague recounts how three friends travel to the Hague and end up embroiled in an international terrorist plot that involves a sensuous woman who may be a Mossad agent

Presents a collection of stories, including 'The Tales of the late Ivan Petrovich Belkin,' 'Roslavlev,' and 'Egyptian nights.' (view table of contents)

Product Description: Pushkin on Literature approaches Pushkin's literary accomplishment from a unique perspective: it focuses on Pushkin the critic and on his passion-are enthusiasm, volatile judgments, joy, frustration and fascination with the literary world that surrounded him...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The author describes life with his wife, Iris Murdoch, and her struggle with Alzheimer's disease

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The husband of Iris Murdoch and author of Elegy for Iris, follows up his moving memoir of his wife's struggle with memory loss by recalling his own past, describing vivid scenes of his childhood in colonial India, his vacations on the English coast, his early love of literature, and his romance with Iris. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.