How to Read Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

Video Description

📚 Read the Great Books with the Hardcore Literature Book Club: https://www.patreon.com/hardcoreliterature ———————————— 🎙️ https://open.spotify.com/show/70IZA24... (Subscribe to the Hardcore Literature Podcast on iTunes & Spotify) 📖 Book Club Discussion: https://www.patreon.com/posts/who-is-greatest-101291574 Hardcore Literature Lecture Series ———————————— 📔Contents Page: https://cutt.ly/CmNhRY3 🎖️ War and Peace: https://cutt.ly/U3nzGma 🎭 Shakespeare Project: https://cutt.ly/B3nxHH7 🐳 Moby Dick: https://cutt.ly/K3nzVKf ☄️ Blood Meridian: https://cutt.ly/P3nz6Qp 🍂 Wuthering Heights: https://cutt.ly/N3nxxYt 🇮🇪 Ulysses: https://cutt.ly/x3nxQmN 🚂 Anna Karenina: https://cutt.ly/vmNhAWv 💀 Crime and Punishment: https://cutt.ly/rmNhFt5 ⚓ Persuasion: https://cutt.ly/amNhX7b 🎠 Don Quixote: https://cutt.ly/cmNjoK4 🇫🇷 Les Misérables: https://cutt.ly/J3YixoA 📖 Middlemarch Serial Reading: https://tinyurl.com/45rv965c ———————————— 0:00 why I love Thomas Hardy 2:00 how to read Far from the Madding Crowd 3:00 what is this story about? 5:30 allusions in great literature 6:30 where does the title come from? 7:30 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard 8:30 what is an elegy in poetry? 10:00 poetry reading assignment for Hardy 11:30 appreciating Thomas Gray’s poem 13:00 Thomas Hardy as poet-novelist 14:00 influence of impressionism on Hardy 15:00 how do we define great literature? 15:30 artistic love languages of writers 16:30 the rise of the novel reading public 17:30 how the Victorians read fiction 18:00 novel as popular entertainment 19:00 a turning point in Hardy’s career 20:00 poetic tradition in English literature 21:00 Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth 22:00 two broad religious poetic traditions 23:00 two traditions of great novels 24:00 Thomas Hardy as tragic novelist 25:00 my first Thomas Hardy novel 26:00 how Hardy wrote this novel 27:00 Shakespeare & Milton in Hardy 28:00 influence of William Wordsworth 28:30 an exciting reading experiment 29:00 aesthetic manifesto of Lyrical Ballads 30:30 Romantic influence on Thomas Hardy 31:30 Hardy takes us into the heart of nature 32:00 the sense of a lost idyllic past 33:00 industrialisation & class anxiety 34:30 appreciating a great Wordsworth poem 35:30 my theory on the mythology of Eden 36:00 the suffering of Hardy’s characters 38:00 Romantic vs Darwinian nature 39:00 the many meanings of romance 40:30 tension of romance vs realism 41:00 complex women characters 42:00 Thomas Hardy’s relationships 42:30 how Victorians named characters 43:30 the protagonists in this novel 44:00 the character of Gabriel Oak 45:30 the character of Bathsheba Everdene 48:00 Sergeant Troy & Farmer Boldwood 49:00 Thomas Hardy’s place names 50:00 on flat vs round characters 51:00 sublime subtlety in characterisation 52:30 Victorian critics vs Thomas Hardy 54:00 Victorian male conceptions of women 55:00 ‘they can’t make up their minds’ 57:00 learning from vicarious experience 58:30 Hardy defies gender conventions 1:01:00 when Gabriel proposes to Bathsheba 1:02:00 ‘I want somebody to tame me’ 1:03:00 Hardy’s critique of marriage 1:04:00 entering the age of the New Woman 1:05:00 were the Victorians really repressed? 1:07:00 what we want vs what we need 1:08:00 the tragic war between the sexes 1:09:00 from Victorianism to Modernism 1:10:00 Virginia Woolf tribute for Hardy 1:12:00 Hardy as greatest tragic novelist 1:15:00 man up against the natural world 1:16:00 living in Thomas Hardy’s Wessex 1:18:30 appreciating my favourite passage 1:21:30 Thomas Hardy lecture series 1:22:00 embracing first reading experience 1:23:00 chapter reading assignments 1:25:00 some reading questions for you