Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Present, The Past And The Material Object, Paul Eggert

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Before Thomas Hardy rose to fame as the author of Tess of the D’Urbervilles and then later as a poet, he had pursued a professional career as an architect and, for a time, as a restorer of medieval church buildings. When he could afford to do so he gave up his professional life for writing, but an abiding attitude toward the past and its material manifestations links the two phases of his life. In his literary works he frequently returned to the possibility of recovering the past, to the conditions of that recovery and thus to the nature of its …