Thomas Hardy In Context

This book covers the range of Thomas Hardy's works while providing a comprehensive introduction to his life and times.

Explores Thomas Hardy's engagement with Victorian legal debates in his prose fiction. Thomas Hardy's fiction is examined in this book in the context of the seismic legal reforms of the nineteenth century as well as legal discourse in the literature of the era. The book examines the ways in which Hardy's role as a magistrate and his interest in the law impacted fundamentally on his prose fiction. It demonstrates that throughout his prose fiction Hardy engages with contentious legal issues that were debated by legal professionals and literary figures of his day, and argues that Hardy used fiction as a forum to question the extent to which legal reform improved the lives of women and the working classes.The study also looks at the ways in which Hardy deployed criminal plots derived from sensation fiction and reveals that the genre's engagement with legal reform influenced not only his sensation novel Desperate Remedies (1871) but also the plots of his subsequent fiction.

This collection covers the range of Thomas Hardy's works and their social and intellectual contexts, providing a comprehensive introduction to Hardy's life and times. Featuring short, lively contributions from forty-four international scholars, the volume explores the processes by which Hardy the man became Hardy the published writer; the changing critical responses to his work; his response to the social and political challenges of his time; his engagement with contemporary intellectual debate; and his legacy in the twentieth century and after. Emphasising the subtle and ongoing interaction between Hardy's life, his creative achievement and the unique historical moment, the collection also examines Hardy's relationship to such issues as class, education, folklore, archaeology and anthropology, evolution, marriage and masculinity, empire and the arts. A valuable contextual reference for scholars of Victorian and modernist literature, the collection will also prove accessible for the general reader of Hardy.

Michael Millgate, one of the world's leading Hardy scholars adds 20 years' worth of new research to his classic biography. He presents new insights into Hardy's writing, his private life and his two marriages.

Shaping Hardy's art: vision, class, and sex -- Hardy and Darwin: an enchanting Hardy? -- The mayor of Casterbridge: reversing the real interlude: Jude and the power of art -- From mindless matter to the art of the mind: The well-beloved -- The poetry of the novels

On the Western Circuit is a novella by Thomas Hardy. Edith is a rural girl who falls in love with an older man, in this romance where the mistakes of love life are tragically explored and bared naked.

Reevaluates Hardy's representations of minds, the will, and consciousness (and nescience) in the context of Victorian brain science and Victorian medical neurology.