A Companion to Thomas Hardy (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture) [Hardcover]

Keith Wilson (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1405156686 | ISBN-13: 978-1405156684 | Publication Date: May 5, 2009 | Edition: 1

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

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Charles Lock's essay on Hardy's poetry provides fresh insights into how Hardy's prose fiction informs his poetry. Hardy was a diverse, complex author, and this text mirrors his diversity and does much to explain his complexity." (CHOICE, 2009)

"An excellent addition to any academic library collection serving English literary studies and the public library looking to provide an up to date critical context for its fiction collection." (Reference Reviews, January 2010)

"Given the range and number of its essays as well as its treatment of those who influenced Hardy, such as Darwin and Mill, this book will be indispensable for anyone conducting research in the nineteenth-century novel or poetry or teaching in the area." (New Books on Literature, October 2009)

From the Back Cover

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 504 pages
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell; 1 edition (May 5, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1405156686
• ISBN-13: 978-1405156684
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 1.3 x 10 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,500,379 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)