Charles Lock

University of Copenhagen · English

This essay considers Hardy’s two funerals—for his ashes at Poets’ Corner, for his heart at Stinsford—in the light of their consequences for life-writing: the absence of a single resting-place, and the narrative demands of synchronicity in telling of two funerals. This division of the body was the consequence of an extraordinary lack of precision in...

This essay offers an investigation into the characteristics or distinctive features of life writing in colonial and postcolonial spaces. Among the examples of life writing here considered are George Lamming’s In The Castle of My Skin and C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary, and, less often treated in this context, works by Benjamin Franklin and Jame...

This essay questions the assumption that the roman alphabet is more purely phonetic than any other, and that other scripts and writing-systems are less efficient, whether for the production of texts or for their comprehension. Those who habitually use roman letters are asked to consider their competence to understand other writing systems. The work...

There is some confusion evident in biographies concerning Ezra Pound's movements at the time of his eightieth birthday, on 30 October 1965. A little-known source from Greece establishes the dates of the week that Pound and Olga Rudge spent in Athens, and fills in some of the details as to whom he met and which sites he was shown. The recollections...

This essay is a meditation on ruins that draws on the writings of Rose Macaulay (1881–1958), notably her novel The World My Wilderness (1950) and her study of antiquity and the picturesque, Pleasure of Ruins (1953), with a view to delineating the relationship between churches and ruins, mediated and negotiated by stones.

NoteReferences and Further Reading

The intentional fallacy is the New Critical tenet that has proved most enduringly cogent. That the enthusiasm for literary biography is undiminished ought to be regrettable: lives priced at over a shilling are liable to give us rather more than the facts. Yet critical practice and wisdom maintain that any interpretation based on biographical data c...

Thomas Hardy and Henry James seem to have shadowed each other throughout their careers, and the critical tradition has extended the rivalry. Theirs was a rivalry not over who was to be regarded as the greatest English novelist of their generation: rather, what was being contested was the status of the novel.1 In critical writings Henry James constr...

Department of English, University of Copenhagen

Some eight years of concentrated composition (c.1900–1908),2 by a writer at the height of his power and ambition, formed the culmination to a fascination with the Napoleonic Wars which Hardy had lived with, tended and nurtured his entire life. Reading in typescript the first volume of Florence Hardy’s biography, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, Sir...

Roman Jakobson's distinction between metaphor and metonymy has been celebrated as a major contribution not only to linguistics and semiotics but to the understanding of ‘language, culture, and human thought in general.’ The implications and the genealogy of this distinction have been, in part, articulated by Jakobson in his most comprehensive expos...

Charles Lock, Erindale College, University of Toronto

Les petroglyphes prehistoriques decouverts sur l'ensemble des continents (environ 20 millions de signes sur, a peu pres, 100 000 sites repertories) sont etudies dans une optique monographique, et dans le but de degager les explications d'un phenomene global et non local. Les technologies modernes permettent aujourd'hui d'envisager le rassemblement...

Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Toronto

Department of English and Erindale College, University of Toronto

Department of English and Erindale College, University of Toronto

'Is there a gulf between the educated, non-academic public and the university intellectuals ... ?' What university intellectuals? 'Commitment to a profession' is a cover for careerism and has little to do with being an intellectual. The assumption that intellectuals find their natural habitat in universities hardly stands examination, in North Amer...

Charles Lock is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. He completed his D.Phil. at Oxford University, and for two years taught at the University of Karlstad, Sweden. He is currently writing a biography of John Cowper Powys, and he has published articles on Powys, Hardy, Hopkins, and other modern writers. 1. Bernard Duffey,...

Department of English, Erindale College, University of Toronto

Associate Professor of English, Erindale College, University of Toronto

Department of English and Erindale College, University of Toronto

Criticism has needed neither to question nor to insist on the importance of Dostoevsky for John Cowper Powys: the influence was claimed and proclaimed by Powys himself throughout his career. From Powys's first reading of Dostoevsky—Vizetelly's translation of Crime and Punishment in December 1910, through uncountable lectures, an essay in his first...

Department of English, University of Toronto