A Companion to Thomas Hardy: (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture)

Through original essays from a distinguished team of international scholars and Hardy specialists, A Companion to Thomas Hardy provides a unique, one-volume resource, which encompasses all aspects of Hardy's major novels, short stories, and poetry Informed by the latest in scholarly, critical, and theoretical debates from some of the world's leading Hardy scholars Reveals groundbreaking insights through examinations of Hardy’s major novels, short stories, poetry, and drama Explores Hardy's work in the context of the major intellectual and socio-cultural currents of his time and assesses his legacy for subsequent writers

Table of Contents:
Notes on Contributors viii List of Abbreviations xiv Introduction 1 Keith Wilson Part I The Life 5 1 Hardy as Biographical Subject 7 Michael Millgate Part II The Intellectual Context 19 2 Hardy and Philosophy 21 Phillip Mallett 3 Hardy and Darwin: An Enchanting Hardy? 36 George Levine 4 Hardy and the Place of Culture 54 Angelique Richardson 5 “The Hard Case of the Would-be-Religious”: Hardy and the Church from Early Life to Later Years 71 Pamela Dalziel 6 Thomas Hardy’s Notebooks 86 William Greenslade 7 “Genres are not to be mixed. . . . I will not mix them”: Discourse, Ideology, and Generic Hybridity in Hardy’s Fiction 102 Richard Nemesvari 8 Hardy and his Critics: Gender in the Interstices 117 Margaret R. Higonnet Part III The Socio-Cultural Context 131 9 “His Country”: Hardy in the Rural 133 Ralph Pite 10 Thomas Hardy of London 146 Keith Wilson 11 “A Thickness of Wall”: Hardy and Class 162 Roger Ebbatson 12 Reading Hardy through Dress: The Case of Far From the Madding Crowd 178 Simon Gatrell 13 Hardy and Romantic Love 194 Michael Irwin 14 Hardy and the Visual Arts 210 J. B. Bullen 15 Hardy and Music: Uncanny Sounds 223 Claire Seymour Part IV The Works 239 16 The Darkening Pastoral: Under the Greenwood Tree and Far From the Madding Crowd 241 Stephen Regan 17 “Wild Regions of Obscurity”: Narrative in The Return of the Native 254 Penny Boumelha 18 Hardy’s “Novels of Ingenuity” Desperate Remedies, The Hand of Ethelberta, and A Laodicean: Rare Hands at Contrivances 267 Mary Rimmer 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 281 Jane Thomas 20 The Haunted Structures of The Mayor of Casterbridge 299 Julian Wolfreys 21 Dethroning the High Priest of Nature in The Woodlanders 313 Andrew Radford 22 Melodrama, Vision, and Modernity: Tess of the d’Urbervilles 328 Tim Dolin 23 Jude the Obscure and English National Identity: The Religious Striations of Wessex 345 Dennis Taylor 24 “. . . into the hands of pure-minded English girls”: Hardy’s Short Stories and the Late Victorian Literary Marketplace 364 Peter Widdowson 25 Sequence and Series in Hardy’s Poetry 378 Tim Armstrong 26 Hardy’s Poems: The Scholarly Situation 395 William W. Morgan 27 That’s Show Business: Spectacle, Narration, and Laughter in The Dynasts 413 G. Glen Wickens Part V Hardy the Modern 431 28 Modernist Hardy: Hand-Writing in The Mayor of Casterbridge 433 J. Hillis Miller 29 Inhibiting the Voice: Thomas Hardy and Modern Poetics 450 Charles Lock 30 Hardy’s Heirs: D. H. Lawrence and John Cowper Powys 465 Terry R. Wright Index 479

About the Author :
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 is also the co-editor, with Michael Millgate, of the 8th volume of The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, and editor for the forthcoming Cambridge edition of Tess of the d'Urbervilles. In addition to his work on Hardy, he has also published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature, Victorian and Edwardian music hall, and the literary representation of London.

Review :
"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)