Simon Gatrell, UGA professor of English and a leading scholar of the work of the English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy, will deliver the annual British and Irish Studies Program lecture Nov. 9 at 4:30 p.m. in Room 265 of Park Hall. The title of his talk is “The Erotics of Dress in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Mayor of Casterbridge.”
Sponsored by BISP, the English department and the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, the lecture and reception following it, are free and open to the public.
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), equally valued as a poet and novelist, is best known for novels such as Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, works which marry a profound insight into character with an acute sense of the conditions of human existence.
Over time, he developed the idea of a single fictional environment for all his work, for which he revived the ancient name “Wessex,” based on the topography of southwestern England.
“Hardy’s delicate handling of the balance between fiction and reality has influenced many subsequent writers, including William Faulkner, and the series of poems he wrote after the death of his first wife, Emma, ranks among the finest elegies in the language,” Gatrell said.
