SOURCE: Yelland, Cris. “Hardy's Allusions and the Problem of ‘Pedantry’.” Australia Journal of Linguistics 4, no. 1 (1995): 17-30.

In the following essay, Yelland builds on the work of previous critics in a discussion of whether Hardy's use of allusion is “pedantic,” and how Hardy's sense of cultural pluralism relates to Victorian concepts of high culture.

1 Hardy's ‘pedantry’ as a Literary Critical Question

A good deal of Hardy criticism, from Victorian reviews on, is severe on Hardy's faults of style. Elliott (1984: 13-19) opens with a brief but damning collection of critical hostility stretching from the first review of Desperate Remedies in 1871 on and into the 1970s. Page (1980: 151-2) opens similarly, as does Chapman (1992: 34-5). Most of the criticism of Hardy's faults of style centres on the problem of ‘pedantry’. This term includes heavy-handed generalisations, pretentious Latinism in lexis, and strained allusions to scientific facts and to objects of high culture, especially...