Thomas Hardy's Medieval Mind
The LRB Podcast
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The Victorian Gothic
John Ruskin, the most famous proselytizer for the Gothic was John Ruskin. Hardy likes to figure himself as Sertristrum and his wife Emma as Isold. And that is entirely a result of the ways in which the Gothic has permeated Victorian culture. So Gothic architecture played not only a crucial role in his own self-figuration, but in the relationship which was crucial to his evolution into both the novel and the poet.
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