THE THOMAS HARDY ASSOCIATION
LINKS
| A 179 |
DIRECTOR: ROBERT SCHWEIK
© 2000-2004
ENCARTA--HARDY
DESCRIPTION:
Address: http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpages/SRPage.aspx?search=Thomas+Hardy&x=13&y=15
Contact: Unidentified
Date: 07/01/04
Part of the Microsoft Corporation's "Encarta" online reference materials. This page provides a five-paragraph biography divided into "Introduction," "Early Works: Novels," and "Later Works: Poetry and Drama," with hyperlinks to other parts of the encyclopedia such as "Literary Style," "motion picture adaptation of Tess of the D'Urbervilles [sic]," "scholars and critics," "motion picture adaptation of Tess of the D'Urbervilles," and a few other categories.
COMMENT:
The very brief biographical article is unsigned. The links to such sub-parts as "Literary Style" are often to no more than brief references and are in some cases misleading. That under "Literary Style" labeled "Use of Irony" does not, in fact, refer to Hardy's use of irony at all but provides, rather, to a reductively simplistic comment on what is termed his "profoundly pessimistic sense of human subjection to fate and circumstance." Another, under the heading "motion picture adaptation of Tess of the D'Urbervilles," misleadingly describes the Roman Polanski film as "about a young woman from a farm family who has two unhappy love affairs," while clicking on "More" leads to, among other things, a category "Scholars and Critics" which gets to information only on Lascelles Abercrombie (1881-1938) and Edmund Blunden (1896-1974). "Search for periodical articles about Hardy, Thomas, in elibrary" leads to a remote commercial site whose great limitations are described in our Link C 35. It should be added that the home page of this site http://encarta.msn.com makes clear its commercial connection with the Microsoft Encarta enterprise.
SUMMARYFor inquiries about Hardy this is a very limited and unreliable reference source.