Hardy was a poet of ghosts. In his poetry he describes himself as posthumous; as rekindling the cinders of passion; as the guardian of the dead forgotten by history; and as haunted by ghosts, particularly the spectre of the lost child (as in the rumour that he fathered a child in the 1860s). Using Derrida, Abraham and Torok and other theorists, and referring to Victorian debates on materialism, this book investigates ghostliness, historicity and memory in Hardy's poetry.

TIM ARMSTRONG is Reader in Modern English and American Literature at Royal Holloway University of London. He is the author of Modernism, Technology and the Body (1998), has edited Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems (1993), American Bodies (1996) and co-edited Beyond the Pleasure Dome: Writing and Addiction from the Romantics (1994).