New Perspectives on Thomas Hardy is a lively and varied collection of new essays on Thomas Hardy, contributed by some of the world's leading Hardy scholars. The essays range widely over Hardy's work, thought, creative methods and life, and show a variety of critical approaches. The essays collected here will appeal equally to scholars, students and non-academic Hardy enthusiasts.

Thomas Hardy penned nearly fifty short stories, but in spite of this impressive number, his contributions to the genre have been relatively understudied. Bringing together an international group of scholars, this is the first edited collection devoted solely to Hardy's works of short fiction. The contributors take up topics related to their publication in periodicals, gender and community relationships, and narrative techniques. Taken together, the essays show that Hardy's short stories are important, not only for what they tell us about Hardy as a writer who straddles the divide between the traditionalist and the modernist, but also for how they reflect and inform the period in which he wrote.

Trial by Ordeal takes a sharp look at central aspects of the critical reception of Thomas Hardy. It demonstrates how critical appropriations of Hardy's work often provide a simplifying, conventional, or conservative image of the writer, which a sophisticated view of his creative intentions by no means confirms. Edward Neill discusses the dangers inherent in interpreting Hardy's writings in terms of his life; the limitations of criticism that views his work as nostalgic reaction; approaches to the poetry; and the critical response to Jude the Obscure.

This is the annotated edition including a rare biographical essay on the life and works of the author. This compilation of Thomas Hardy's short stories is one of the most complete on the book market. Every single story was tracked down and integrated into this book. Hours of enjoyable reading lies ahead of you because Hardy was a real genius among the English fiction writers. From the contents: A Changed Man The Waiting Supper Alicia's Diary The Grave By The Handpost Enter A Dragoon A Tryst At An Ancient Earth Work What The Shepherd Saw: A Tale Of Four Moonlight Nights A Committee-Man Of 'The Terror' Master John Horseleigh, Knight The Duke's Reappearance—A Family Tradition A Mere Interlude The First Countess Of Wessex Barbara Of The House Of Grebe The Marchioness Of Stonehenge Lady Mottisfont The Lady Icenway Squire Petrick's Lady Anna, Lady Baxby The Lady Penelope The Duchess Of Hamptonshire The Honourable Laura The Son's Veto For Conscience' Sake A Tragedy Of Two Ambitions On The Western Circuit To Please His Wife The Melancholy Hussar Of The German Legion The Fiddler Of The Reels A Tradition Of Eighteen Hundred And Four A Few Crusted Characters Tony Kytes, The Arch-Deceiver The History Of The Hardcomes The Superstitious Man's Story Andrey Satchel And The Parson And Clerk Old Andrey's Experience As A Musician Absent-Mindedness In A Parish Choir The Winters And The Palmleys Incident In The Life Of Mr. George Crookhill Netty Sargent's Copyhold An Imaginative Woman The Three Strangers ... and many more ...

In The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy, some of the most prominent Hardy specialists working today offer an overview of Hardy scholarship and suggest new directions in Hardy studies. The contributors cover virtually every area relevant to Hardy's fiction and poetry, including philosophy, palaeontology, biography, science, film, popular culture, beliefs, gender, music, masculinity, tragedy, topography, psychology, metaphysics, illustration, bibliographical studies and contemporary response. While several collections have surveyed the Hardy landscape, no previous volume has been composed especially 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. Among the features are a comprehensive bibliography that includes not only works in English but, in acknowledgment of Hardy's explosion in popularity around the world, also works in languages other than English.

This fascinating new study by Mark Asquith offers an original approach to Hardy's art as a novelist and entirely new readings of certain musical scenes in Hardy's works. Asquith utilizes a rich seam of original archival research (both scientific and musicological), which will be of use to all Hardy scholars, and discusses a range of Hardy's major works in relation to musical metaphors - from early fiction The Poor Man and the Lady to later major works Jude the Obscure, Far From the Madding Crowd, the Mayor of Casterbridge .

- A complex critical portrait of one of the most influential writers in the world- Bibliographic information that directs readers to additional resources for further study- A useful chronology of the writer's life- An introductory essay by Harold Bloom.

This major new reading of the novels of Thomas Hardy, by leading critic George Levine, disentangles the author's often elaborately distanced prose from his beautiful poetic and precise renderings of the natural world. Clear, direct and minimally academic in his own writing, Levine provides an overview of Hardy's entire fictional canon, with extensive discussions of his early and late novels including his last, The Well-Beloved. Levine draws new attention to the way Hardy absorbed both the ideas and the writing strategies of Charles Darwin, and develops new perspectives first articulated in the criticism of great novelists - in particular Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Levine departs from the critical norm by reading Hardy in the context of his deep feeling for the natural world and all living things, and the implicit affirmation of life that sometimes drives his bleakest narratives.

The poems of Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) are key to understanding 19th, 20th and even 21st century poetry. This collection of fresh essays sheds new light on Hardy's poems--some of which have received little critical attention--from a variety of thematic and analytical approaches, offering a detailed picture of how his works are currently being read. The contributors discuss why Hardy's poetic genius is less and less overshadowed by his career as a novelist and highlight his passionate attention to small details, his delight in "noticing things" and his "eye for...mysteries."