Hardy's The Three Strangers is the story of three mysterious men, one of them, Timothy Summers, convicted of sheep-stealing, who interrupt party of shepherds celebrating a birth and a christening. The men behave strangely indeed....

This book reassesses Hardy’s fiction in the light of his prolonged engagement with the folklore and traditions of rural England. Drawing on wide research, it demonstrates the pivotal role played in the novels by such customs and beliefs as ‘overlooking’, hag-riding, skimmington-riding, sympathetic magic, mumming, bonfire nights, May Day celebrations, Midsummer divination, and the ‘Portland Custom’. This study shows how such traditions were lived out in practice in village life, and how they were represented in written texts – in literature, newspapers, county histories, folklore books, the work of the Folklore Society, archival documents, and letters. It explores tensions between Hardy’s repeated insistence on the authenticity of his accounts and his engagement with contemporary anthropologists and folklorists, and reveals how his efforts to resist their ‘excellently neat’ categories of culture open up wider questions about the nature of belief, progress, and social change.

Focusing on figures such as Thomas Hardy, Alan Turing, Virginia Woolf, and the World War One poets, The Hardy Tree examines power, oppression and individual rights in ways that reverberate through our lives today. Uniting these themes is the issue of communication—the various methods and codes we use to reach one another. The book is arranged in four sections. The first visits Vladimir Nabokov as a child with alphabet blocks, Alan Turing at eleven writing home from boarding school with a “pen of his own making,” Virginia Woolf as a teenager practicing her penmanship, and Wilfred Owen trying to draw a musical note from a blade of grass on a battlefield on the Somme. The second section focuses more deeply on various types of encoding; the third erases the Magna Carta; the fourth offers a provisional peace. These sections lean against one another the way that history leans upon itself. Backed by Bierds’ intensive research and woven with scientific evidence, she pushes us to consider our futures in direct conversation with the past.

The first attempt to produce a Thomas Hardy Dictionary was made in 1911, before many of his finest poems had even been written, and since then there have been many attempts to produce reference works on his works and his life. None, however, can claim the authority and comprehensiveness ofthis Oxford Reader's Companion to Hardy. Under the editorial direction of Professor Norman Page, more than 40 of the world's most prominent experts on Hardy have been brought together to combine their insights and understandings of all aspects of Hardy studies. The result is a unique synthesis of knowledge, incorporating different nationalinterests and traditions of scholarship, investigating Hardy's life, work, and influences, and the historical context in which he wrote. As well as the assurance of sound scholarship and the convenience of the companion format, there are unexpected delights for the browser, such as entries on alcohol, humour, and pets. The Oxford Reader's Companion to Hardy is an indispensable bible for the Hardy scholar and the Hardy readeralike.

Bringing together eminent Hardy scholars, The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy offers an overview of Hardy scholarship and suggests new directions in Hardy studies. While several collections have surveyed the Hardy landscape, no previous volume has been composed specifically for scholars and advanced graduate students. This companion is specially designed to aid original research on Hardy and serve as the critical basis for Hardy studies in the new millennium.