Thomas Hardy Remembered. (The Nineteenth Century Series). Ed. Martin Ray

• Rolf Lessenich

After the death of the ‘death of the author’, post-postmodern critics are no longer ashamed of admitting that a literary masterpiece is not merely an item in the dump of intertextuality, but the outstanding product of an individual artist with his very particular psyche and experience of life. Even during the heyday of poststructuralism and deconstructionism, a number of literary critics refused to conform to the dictates of fashion, to mention only Peter Brooks, Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University, or Gary Scharnhorst, editor of American Literary Scholarship. As Peter Brooks admitted in an interview published in 1994, biography then was “one of the few forms that a literary critic can use, in our culture, to reach a large audience.” The vogue of literary biographies then proved a healthy counterpoise to the ideology of the democracy of all texts.

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