Title:
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Imaginative slaves : Thomas Hardy, social relations, and Victorian readers
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Imaginative Slaves explores the question of how Thomas Hardy imagined and
addressed his contemporary readers. The representative or ideal reader sparked
incessant conflict between all those who controlled the late-nineteenth-century
reading industry. This thesis attempts to understand Hardy's imagined readers as
constructs which he developed and shaped in largely antagonistic response to his
culture's dominant conceptions of the reader, especially the oppressively pervasive
conceptions held by publishers, editors, circulating libraries, and critics. All these
conceptions tended to circle around the powerful reader of the day: the middle-class
reader. Questions of class and gender, therefore, are particularly important to this
thesis which very much grounds Hardy and his readers in their cultural, historical
context. Hardy's unconventional, contentious attitudes towards his readers are
considered as challenges to class and gender divisions, challenges, indeed, to the
hardening Victorian social system. Hardy's novels, ultimately, question the belief
that people are and should be members of narrowly defined, divisive social strata.
Imaginative Slaves begins with a general discussion of Victorian reading culture, its
structure, forms, ruling ideas, values, misconceptions, and anxieties. Moving on to
consider perhaps the dominant conception of the reader, the Young Girl, it examines
Hardy's struggles with this reader figure. Other important conceptions of the reader
and reading are then tackled: the sensation reader and the working-class reader whose
shadowy, threatening figure haunted and motivated many of the middle-class
strictures placed on fiction such as Hardy's. The thesis ends with a consideration of
both Hardy's legacy in the form of theatrical adaptations and the interpretive and
social implications ofactual readers' theatrical reinvention of his novels.
This thesis also implicitly questions recent critics' understandings of the popular or
non-academic reader. Imaginonve Slaves, emulating Hardy, attempts to offer a rich,
challenging, and socially grounded portrayal of readers which recognizes the potential
power ofthe reader and the reading process
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