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dc.contributor.authorTate, Gregory
dc.date.accessioned2022-09-23T15:30:03Z
dc.date.available2022-09-23T15:30:03Z
dc.date.issued2022-09-16
dc.identifier.citationTate , G 2022 , ' Thomas Hardy's pure English ' , Victorian Literature and Culture , vol. 50 , no. 3 , pp. 521-547 . https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150321000061en
dc.identifier.issn1060-1503
dc.identifier.otherPURE: 273171166
dc.identifier.otherPURE UUID: 2abf2564-dd30-4a05-8f38-977124df8d62
dc.identifier.otherORCID: /0000-0002-5930-8187/work/119628643
dc.identifier.otherWOS: 000854206900006
dc.identifier.otherScopus: 85139610347
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10023/26067
dc.description.abstractThis article examines Thomas Hardy's conflicting responses to late-Victorian debates about grammatical prescriptivism and linguistic purism. While Hardy claimed that “purism, whether in grammar or vocabulary, almost always means ignorance,” he also frequently expressed his interest in the (perhaps unrealizable) ideal of a “pure English” founded on fixed and unequivocal grammatical rules. Focusing on Tess of the d'Urbervilles, a novel subtitled “A Pure Woman,” I argue that this ambivalence informed the grammar of Hardy's prose style in his fiction. In this novel, Hardy employs the ambiguous modality of the English language, the imprecise grammatical distinction between the indicative statement of facts and the subjunctive elaboration of conceptions and hypotheses, both to sustain and to interrogate the binary of the real and the ideal that underpins his simultaneous critique and defense of the notion of “purity.” This use of modality highlights an analogy between Hardy's views on moral and linguistic purity: in each case, he rejects narrow estimations of purity, while nonetheless championing an ideal—of “pure English” and the “pure woman”—that transcends the limited perspectives of conventional purisms.
dc.language.isoeng
dc.relation.ispartofVictorian Literature and Cultureen
dc.rightsCopyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.en
dc.subjectThomas Hardyen
dc.subjectVictorian novelen
dc.subjectHistorical linguisticsen
dc.subjectEnglish grammaren
dc.subjectPE Englishen
dc.subjectT-NDASen
dc.subject.lccPEen
dc.titleThomas Hardy's pure Englishen
dc.typeJournal articleen
dc.description.versionPublisher PDFen
dc.contributor.institutionUniversity of St Andrews. School of Englishen
dc.identifier.doihttps://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150321000061
dc.description.statusPeer revieweden


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