A Companion to Thomas Hardy

A Companion to Thomas Hardy brings together new essays on all aspects of Thomas Hardy’s work by thirty of the world’s most distinguished Hardy scholars. Groundbreaking insights are revealed through examinations of his novels, short stories, poetry, and the often neglected epic–drama, The Dynasts , that Hardy, like many of his contemporaries, considered to be his major achievement. The Companion provides an influential re–assessment of Hardy’s place in both Victorian and Modern literature, with essays that consider his complexity as a biographical subject, probe his ideas and attitudes in relation to their socio–cultural, scientific, and philosophical contexts, analyze his distinctive achievements in the remarkable variety of genres in which he worked, and assess his legacy for subsequent modernist writers. Comprehensive and authoritative, A Companion to Thomas Hardy offers an unparalleled range of contemporary scholarship on an author whose transitional position between the late nineteenth– and early twentieth–centuries makes him central to the study of both. This Companion provides a seamless overview of the entirety of Hardy’s oeuvre, through historical contextualization and analysis of key works.

Notes on Contributors List of Abbreviations Introduction: Keith Wilson ( University of Ottawa ) Part I: The Life: 1. Hardy as Biographical Subject: Michael Millgate ( University of Toronto ) Part II: The Intellectual Context : 2. Hardy and Philosophy: Phillip Mallett ( University of St Andrews ) 3. Hardy and Darwin: An Enchanting Hardy?: George Levine ( Rutgers University / New York University ) 4. Hardy and the Place of Culture: Angelique Richardson ( University of Exeter ) 5. “The Hard Case of the Would–be–Religious”: Hardy and the Church from Early Life to Later Years: Pamela Dalziel ( University of British Columbia ) 6. Thomas Hardy’s Notebooks: William Greenslade (University of the West of England) 7. “Genres are not to be mixed. . . . I will not mix them”: Discourse, Ideology, and Generic Hybridity in Hardy’s Fiction: Richard Nemesvari (St Francis Xavier University) 8. Hardy and his Critics: Gender in the Interstices: Margaret R. Higonnet ( University of Connecticut ) Part III: The Socio–Cultural Context: 9. “His Country”: Hardy in the Rural: Ralph Pite ( University of Bristol ) 10. Thomas Hardy of London : Keith Wilson ( University of Ottawa ) 11. “A Thickness of Wall”: Hardy and Class: Roger Ebbatson ( University of Worcester ) 12. Reading Hardy through Dress: The Case of Far From the Madding Crowd : Simon Gatrell ( University of Georgia ) 13. Hardy and Romantic Love: Michael Irwin ( University of Kent ) 14. Hardy and the Visual Arts: J. B. Bullen ( University of Reading ) 15. Hardy and Music: Uncanny Sounds: Claire Seymour (Queen’s College London) Part IV: The Works: 16.The Darkening Pastoral: Under the Greenwood Tree and Far From the Madding Crowd : Stephen Regan ( University of Durham ) 17. “Wild Regions of Obscurity”: Narrative in The Return of the Native : Penny Boumelha ( Victoria University of Wellington , New Zealand ) 18. Hardy’s “Novels of Ingenuity.” Desperate Remedies , The Hand of Ethelberta , and A Laodicean : Rare Hands at Contrivances: Mary Rimmer ( University of New Brunswick ) 19. Hardy’s “Romances and Fantasies.” A Pair of Blue Eyes , The Trumpet–Major , Two on a Tower , and The Well–Beloved : Experiments in Metafiction: Jane Thomas ( University of Hull ) 20. The Haunted Structures of The Mayor of Casterbridge : Julian Wolfreys ( Loughborough University ) 21. Dethroning the High Priest of Nature in The Woodlanders : Andrew Radford ( University of Glasgow ) 22. Melodrama, Vision, and Modernity: Tess of the d’Urbervilles : Tim Dolin (Curtin University of Technology, Perth , Western Australia ) 23. Jude the Obscure and English National Identity: The Religious Striations of Wessex : Dennis Taylor ( Boston College ) 24. “… into the hands of pure–minded English girls”: Hardy’s Short Stories and the Late Victorian Literary Marketplace: Peter Widdowson ( University of Gloucestershire ) 25. Sequence and Series in Hardy’s Poetry: Tim Armstrong ( Royal Holloway College , University of London ) 26. Hardy’s Poems: The Scholarly Situation: William W. Morgan ( Illinois State University ) 27. That’s Show Business: Spectacle, Narration, and Laughter in The Dynasts : G. Glen Wickens (Bishop’s University) Part V: Hardy the Modern: 28. Modernist Hardy: Hand–Writing in The Mayor of Casterbridge : J. Hillis Miller ( University of California at Irvine ) 29. Inhibiting the Voice: Thomas Hardy and Modern Poetics: Charles Lock ( University of Copenhagen ) 30. Hardy’s Heirs: D. H. Lawrence and John Cowper Powys: Terry R. Wright ( Newcastle University ) Index

Keith Wilson is Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of Thomas Hardy on Stage (1995), editor of the Penguin Classics editions of The Mayor of Casterbridge (1997; 2003) and The Fiddler of the Reels and Other Stories (2003, with Kristin Brady), and editor of Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate (2006). He has also published widely on nineteenth– and twentieth–century British literature, Victorian and Edwardian music hall, and the literary representation of London.

“Perhaps Hardy the poet needs a separate Companion.  If it matched this one in the quality of writing and usefulness to the student, it would be a treasure.”  ( Victorian Studies , 1 October 2012) "Keith Wilson′s A Companion to Thomas Hardy , is distinguished for the thoroughness with which it covers intellectual contexts and for the quality of its contributors. Scholars and students of Hardy will not want to be without it." Studies in English Literature "Like the many other titles in the Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture series, this volume offers comprehensive, newly written work that meets the needs of experienced undergraduates, graduate students, and all who seek the best recent scholarship on Hardy ... These fresh perspectives on Hardy will lead many to reread Hardy with new vision." English Literature in Transition