Abstract
‘People are always talking about originality; but what do they mean? … If I could give an account of all that I owe to great predecessors and contemporaries, there would be a small balance in my favour’, Goethe told Eckermann. Hardy made no such general admission; he indicated writers who were great masters and examplars to him, and emphasized that he was a ‘born bookworm’. That, and ‘that alone’, was unchanging in him, he added (at the opening of the chapter ‘Student and Architect’ in his Life). It may not occasion surprise therefore to find that his works contain frequent literary references, allusions, and quotations; that other writers’ images gave him narrative and scenic ideas; and that, like Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights, he sometimes, as a means of furthering his own fiction, adapted or borrowed episodes, situations, and details from literature which impressed him.
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Notes
Life 170–1/177; Harold Orel (ed.), Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, Lawrence, Kansas, 1966, and London, 1967, p. 107; I Samuel xxviii.
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© 1990 F. B. Pinion
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Pinion, F.B. (1990). Literary Allusion and Indebtedness. In: Hardy the Writer. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230389458_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230389458_17
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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