Abstract
Centered on the unique chronotope of Oxford, this essay traces the ways Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy invoke and compromise our ability to relate past to present. In the sonnet ‘Duns Scotus’s Oxford’ and the novel Jude the Obscure, Hopkins and Hardy respectively present the city of Oxford as a central confluence of medieval and early modern pasts with a Victorian present. To further link past and present, the poet and novelist both enter into the medieval conceit of the wind, wherein a lover gains intimacy with the beloved through mutually shared breath, but they do so for cross-purposes. Whereas a connection to the past is preserved in Hopkins’s sonnet by a theological understanding of the ether, any such connection is a dangerous illusion in Hardy’s novel. Yet, even with this divergence, Hardy, like Hopkins, still leads the reader into a shared sacramental intimacy suggested through medieval influences on the novel.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Altick, R. 1965. Introduction to Past and Present, by Thomas Carlyle, v–xviii. New York: New York University Press.
Armstrong, I. 1993. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, Politics. New York: Routledge.
Austin, L. 2011. The Nostalgic Moment and the Sense of History. postmedieval 2(2): 127–140.
Bakhtin, M. 1981. The Dialogical Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Benson, L.D., ed. 1987. The Riverside Chaucer. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Blair, K. 2012. Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Brown, D. 1997. Hopkins’ Idealism: Philosophy, Physics, Poetry. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Carew, T. 1640. A Prayer to the Wind. In Coelum Britannicum. London. Early English Books Online: http://gateway.proquest.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:7793:11.
Carlyle, T. [1843] 1965. Past and Present. New York: New York University Press.
Dau, D. 2012. Touching God: Hopkins and Love. London: Anthem Press.
Farrell, J. 1997. Crossroads to Community: Jude the Obscure and the Chronotope of Wessex. In Dialogue and Critical Discourse Language, Culture, Critical Theory, ed. M. Macovski, 65–78. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fischler, A. 1985. A Kinship with Job: Obscurity and Remembrance in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Journal of English and Germanic Philology 84(4): 515–533.
Frank, E. 1979. Literary Architecture: Essays Toward a Tradition: Walter Pater, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marcel Proust, Henry James. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Gardner, W.H. 1948. Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Study of Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition. 2 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Griffin, N. 1929. Introduction to The Filostrato of Giovanni Boccacio, by Giovanni Boccacio, 1–107. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hardy, T. [1895] 1999. Jude the Obscure. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
Holmes, O. 2015. Petrarch and the Vernacular Lyric Past. In The Cambdridge Companion to Petrarch. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Hopkins, G.M. 1959. The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. C. Devlin. London: Oxford University Press.
Hopkins, G.M. 1986. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oxford Authors. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hopkins, G.M. 2013. Gerard Manley Hopkins Correspondence, ed. L. Higgins and M. F. Suarez. 8 vols. Vol. 1, The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Ingham, P. 1976. The Evolution of Jude the Obscure. Review of English Studies 27(105): 27–37.
Ireland, K. 2014. Thomas Hardy, Time and Narrative: A Narratological Approach to his Novels. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kent, R. 2015. The Late Medieval Origins of the Modern Novel. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
King James Bible. 2017. http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.com/.
LaPorte, C. 2011. Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press.
Mariani, P. 1990. The Sound of Oneself Breathing. In Critical Essays on Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. A Sulloway. Boston: G. K. Hall.
Marucci, F. 1994. The Fine Delight that Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley Hopkins. Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press.
Matz, A. 2014. Hardy and the Vanity of Procreation. Victorian Studies 57(1): 7–32.
Mentz, S. 2013. A Poetics of Nothing: Air in the Early Modern Imagination. Postmedieval 4(1): 30-41.
Migne, J. P., ed. 1919. Patrologiæ Cursus Completus, series Graeca. Paris, France.
Novalis. 1997. Christendom or Europe. In Novalis: Philosophical Writings, ed. M. Stoljar. New York: State University of New York Press.
Rogers, S. 1999. Medievalism in the Last Novels of Thomas Hardy: New Wine in Old Bottles. English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 42(3): 298–316.
Saville, J.F. 2000. A Queer Chivalry: The Homoerotic Asceticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia.
Wilhelm, J. 1971. Medieval Song: An Anthology of Hymns and Lyrics. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company.
Wordsworth, W. [1807] 1914. Wordsworth: Poems in Two Volumes. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.
Acknowledgements
Comments by Laura Otis and two anonymous reviewers were integral in improving an earlier version of this paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Adamson, C. The Compromised chronotope of Christminster: Hardy and Hopkins’s medieval Oxford. Postmedieval 9, 72–87 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-017-0064-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-017-0064-0