'Hardy's Subjunctive Mood'

A THS Conference/Festival Lecture by Professor Tim Armstrong

Monday 25th July at 8.00pm - The Town Hall, Corn Exchange, Dorchester

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The opening night speaker of the 2022 THS Conference and Festival is Professor Tim Armstrong of Royal Holloway University, who appeared on Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time discussing Hardy. This talk will look at moments where Hardy uses the subjunctive mood or conditionals in his poetry (with some reference to the novels). This includes moments when he writes 'that I could think' or 'could I but will' or '[it] had been triumph' and the like; but in other cases we will look at the way that whole poems are structured by a counter-factual imagination. What does it mean to imagine something that did not happen or might happen? What do conditionals tell us about how we think about causality and our paths through life? Can we imagine a different world from the one we are given?

Tim Armstrong is Professor of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include Modernism, Technology and the Body (1998), Modernism: A Cultural Study (2005) and The Logic of Slavery: Debt, Technology and Pain in American Literature (2013). On Hardy, he has published Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History, Memory (Palgrave, 2000), and an annotated Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems (Longman 1993, 2009). He is currently working on mid-century literary debates in which Hardy is often remembered alongside Lawrence.