A Companion to Thomas Hardy

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.