Thomas Hardy's Wessex: Watching the Dancers through the Novelist's Eyes

Thomas Hardy's literary Wessex is a place where dance plays numerous important roles: provides entertainment, is a part of various celebrations, gives an opportunity for young people to meet and fall in love. Interesting, Hardy's descriptions of folk dances are always full of minute details which, if analysed carefully, can, indeed, become a real treasure for dance historians. In my paper, I intend to show how Hardy was always 'watching' his fellow dancers and how, in turn, the contemporary reader can 'watch' Victorian dancers through the novelist's writing. I will talk about how my research into the English literature led me to archives and libraries in search of the original Victorian music sheets and choreographies, allowing me to discover an intricate web of connections between the written word, music, and dance in the Victorian world. 

About the author

Katarzyna Koźma holds MA in English and BA in Italian from the University of Wroclaw. She wrote her MA thesis on representation of dance in Thomas Hardy's Wessex texts. In 2020, she became a graduate student at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań pursuing her MA in Italian. Trained in ballet, she is also a member of the Student Historical Dance Society at the University of Wroclaw, both performing and popularising early dance. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Victorian literature, linguistics and dance culture. She has delivered conference papers on dance scenes in Haggard's King Solomon's Mines read in the context of Victorian anthropology, and on dance in Thomas Hardy's short story as a community binding factor. During the last Oxford Dance Symposium, she spoke on reading the instructions for Sir Roger de Coverley in the light of cognitive linguistics.