Thomas Hardy's Shorter Fiction: A Critical Study

Sophie Gilmartin and Rod Mengham

This critical study of Hardy’s short stories provides a thorough account of the ruling preoccupations and recurrent writing strategies of his entire corpus as well as providing detailed readings of several individual texts. It relates the formal choices imposed on Hardy as contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine and other periodicals to the methods he employed to encode in fiction his troubled attitude towards the social politics of the West Country, where most of the stories are set. No previous criticism has shown how the powerful challenges to the reader mounted in Hardy’s later stories reveal the complexity of his motivations during a period when he was moving progressively in the direction of exchanging fiction for poetry.

Features

*The only book to provide comprehensive criticism of Hardy’s entire output of short stories.

*The provision of extremely full, extremely detailed, close readings of a number of key stories enhances the book’s attractiveness as a potential teaching resource.

*Draws on the work of social historians to make clear the background of social and political unrest in Dorset that is partly uncovered and partly hidden in Hardy’s portrayals of his fictional Wessex.

*Offers fascinating insights into Hardy’s near-obsession in his mature phase with the marriage contract, and with its legal binding of erratic men and women.

Related Subjects

• Literary Criticism and Theory

About the Author

Sophie Gilmartin is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (CUP), has edited an edition of Anthony Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset for Penguin Classics, and has published articles on Hardy, nineteenth-century poetry and painting, and Victorian widowhood.

Rod Mengham is Reader in Modern English Literature at the University of Cambridge where he is a Fellow and Director of Studies at Jesus College. He is the author of books on Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Henry Green and The Descent of Language. He has edited or co-edited three collections of essays on contemporary fiction, two collections on Australian poetry, and single volumes on the fiction of th 1940s, and on violence and avant-garde art.

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