Keith Wilson is Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of Thomas Hardy on Stage (1995), editor of the Penguin Classics editions of The Mayor of Casterbridge (1997; 2003) and The Fiddler of the Reels and Other Stories (2003, with Kristin Brady), and editor of Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate (2006). He is also the co-editor, with Michael Millgate, of the 8th volume of The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, and editor for the forthcoming Cambridge edition of Tess of the d'Urbervilles. In addition to his work on Hardy, he has also published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature, Victorian and Edwardian music hall, and the literary representation of London.

“Perhaps Hardy the poet needs a separate Companion.  If it matched this one in the quality of writing and usefulness to the student, it would be a treasure.”  (Victorian Studies, 1 October 2012)

• Notes on Contributors viii List of Abbreviations xivIntroduction 1Keith WilsonPart I The Life 51 Hardy as Biographical Subject 7Michael MillgatePart II The Intellectual Context 192 Hardy and Philosophy 21Phillip Mallett3 Hardy and Darwin: An Enchanting Hardy? 36George Levine4 Hardy and the Place of Culture 54Angelique Richardson5 “The Hard Case of the Would-be-Religious”: Hardy and the Church from Early Life to Later Years 71Pamela Dalziel6 Thomas Hardy’s Notebooks 86William Greenslade7 “Genres are not to be mixed. . . . I will not mix them”: Discourse, Ideology, and Generic Hybridity in Hardy’s Fiction 102Richard Nemesvari8 Hardy and his Critics: Gender in the Interstices 117Margaret R. HigonnetPart III The Socio-Cultural Context 1319 “His Country”: Hardy in the Rural 133Ralph Pite10 Thomas Hardy of London 146Keith Wilson11 “A Thickness of Wall”: Hardy and Class 162Roger Ebbatson12 Reading Hardy through Dress: The Case of Far From the Madding Crowd 178Simon Gatrell13 Hardy and Romantic Love 194Michael Irwin14 Hardy and the Visual Arts 210J. B. Bullen15 Hardy and Music: Uncanny Sounds 223Claire SeymourPart IV The Works 23916 The Darkening Pastoral: Under the Greenwood Tree and Far From the Madding Crowd 241Stephen Regan17 “Wild Regions of Obscurity”: Narrative in The Return of the Native 254Penny Boumelha18 Hardy’s “Novels of Ingenuity” Desperate Remedies, The Hand of Ethelberta, and A Laodicean: Rare Hands at Contrivances 267Mary Rimmer19 Hardy’s “Romances and Fantasies” A Pair of Blue Eyes, The Trumpet-Major, Two on a Tower, and The Well-Beloved: Experiments in Metafiction 281Jane Thomas20 The Haunted Structures of The Mayor of Casterbridge 299Julian Wolfreys21 Dethroning the High Priest of Nature in The Woodlanders 313Andrew Radford 22 Melodrama, Vision, and Modernity: Tess of the d’Urbervilles 328Tim Dolin23 Jude the Obscure and English National Identity: The Religious Striations of Wessex 345Dennis Taylor24 “. . . into the hands of pure-minded English girls”: Hardy’s Short Stories and the Late Victorian Literary Marketplace 364Peter Widdowson25 Sequence and Series in Hardy’s Poetry 378Tim Armstrong26 Hardy’s Poems: The Scholarly Situation 395William W. Morgan27 That’s Show Business: Spectacle, Narration, and Laughter in The Dynasts 413G. Glen WickensPart V Hardy the Modern 43128 Modernist Hardy: Hand-Writing in The Mayor of Casterbridge 433J. Hillis Miller29 Inhibiting the Voice: Thomas Hardy and Modern Poetics 450Charles Lock30 Hardy’s Heirs: D. H. Lawrence and John Cowper Powys 465Terry R. WrightIndex 479