Online Talk

Thomas Hardy and the Literature of War

4 August 2022, 7:00pm - 8:00pm

Due to Covid, this event is now taking place via Zoom

Kate Adie will discuss the writer Thomas Hardy’s changing views on war and conflict with panellists Phillip Mallett and Tai-Chun Ho.

In his youth, Thomas Hardy was fascinated by the colour and strategy of the Napoleonic Wars, or The Great War as he knew it. It provided the inspiration for his action-packed novel The Trumpet-Major (1880). However, the later conflicts that he witnessed – the Crimea War, Boer Wars and the First World War – led him to examine war more critically in his writing.

The panellists will explore Hardy’s changing relationship with war, along with his friendships with critics, supporters and war poets, like Sydney Dobell, Rudyard Kipling, Millicent Fawcett and Siegfried Sassoon.

Phillip Mallett is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews, and a Vice-President of the Thomas Hardy Society. His published work includes Rudyard Kipling: a Literary Life (Macmillan), a number of edited seven collections of essays, most recently Thomas Hardy in Context for Cambridge UP and The Victorian Novel and Masculinity for Palgrave, as well as scholarly editions of The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Under the Greenwood Tree. His edition of Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford for Oxford World’s Classics was published in September 2021.

Tai-Chun Ho is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and
Literatures at National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan. His book The Crimean War in Victorian Poetry (Oxford, U.K.: Peter Lang, 2021) explores the predicaments and achievements of mid-Victorian war poets. His article ‘Writing Catchpenny Verse at Times of Military Crisis in the Nineteenth Century’ is forthcoming from Victorian Periodicals Review. He has recently completed an article on Hardy’s Boer War poetry and is currently writing an article ‘The Crimean War’ for Oxford Bibliographies in Victorian Literature.

Kate Adie became a familiar figure through her work as BBC Chief News Correspondent. She is considered to be among the most reliable reporters, as well as one of the first British women, to send despatches from danger zones around the world. Kate is also the long-serving presenter of Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent and a presenter or contributor to many other radio and television programmes. She has also served as a trustee of the Imperial War Museum.