"Hardy was a ghost-ridden author. He described himself as a 'ghost-seer', and in his poetry he constantly writes about the spirits of the dead, whether people known to him, imagined ghosts, or the more abstract spirits who might appear before the bar of history for judgement.

This study argues that the idea of haunting is central to his work: in his conception of his 'second' career as a poet; in the phantom of the lost child which permeates his writings (and reproduces itself in the accusation that he fathered a bastard child with his cousin); in his elegaic writings and intertextual references; and with the way he thinks about history, language and consciousness.

Using the work of Derrida, Abraham and Torok, Walter Benjamin and other theorists, and referring to Victorian debates on materialism and historiography, Tim Armstrong investigates ghostliness, historicity, the event and the status of memory in Hardy's poems."--BOOK JACKET.