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.

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

Notes on Contributors viii
List of Abbreviations xiv
Introduction 1
Keith Wilson
Part I The Life 5
1 Hardy as Biographical Subject 7
Michael Millgate
Part II The Intellectual Context 19
2 Hardy and Philosophy 21
Phillip Mallett
3 Hardy and Darwin: An Enchanting Hardy? 36
George Levine
4 Hardy and the Place of Culture 54
Angelique Richardson
5 "The Hard Case of the Would-be-Religious": Hardy and the Church from Early Life to Later Years 71
Pamela Dalziel
6 Thomas Hardy's Notebooks 86
William Greenslade
7 "Genres are not to be mixed. . . . I will not mix them": Discourse, Ideology, and Generic Hybridity in Hardy's Fiction 102
Richard Nemesvari
8 Hardy and his Critics: Gender in the Interstices 117
Margaret R. Higonnet
Part III The Socio-Cultural Context 131
9 "His Country": Hardy in the Rural 133
Ralph Pite
10 Thomas Hardy of London 146
Keith Wilson
11 "A Thickness of Wall": Hardy and Class 162
Roger Ebbatson
12 Reading Hardy through Dress: The Case of Far From the Madding Crowd 178
Simon Gatrell
13 Hardy and Romantic Love 194
Michael Irwin
14 Hardy and the Visual Arts 210
J. B. Bullen
15 Hardy and Music: Uncanny Sounds 223
Claire Seymour
Part IV The Works 239
16 The Darkening Pastoral: Under the Greenwood Tree and Far From the Madding Crowd 241
Stephen Regan
17 "Wild Regions of Obscurity": Narrative in The Return of the Native 254
Penny Boumelha
18 Hardy's "Novels of Ingenuity" Desperate Remedies, The Hand of Ethelberta, and A Laodicean: Rare Hands at Contrivances 267
Mary Rimmer
19 Hardy's "Romances and Fantasies" A Pair of Blue Eyes, The Trumpet-Major, Two on a Tower, and The Well-Beloved: Experiments in Metafiction 281
Jane Thomas
20 The Haunted Structures of The Mayor of Casterbridge 299
Julian Wolfreys
21 Dethroning the High Priest of Nature in The Woodlanders 313
Andrew Radford
22 Melodrama, Vision, and Modernity: Tess of the d'Urbervilles 328
Tim Dolin
23 Jude the Obscure and English National Identity: The Religious Striations of Wessex 345
Dennis Taylor
24 ". . . into the hands of pure-minded English girls": Hardy's Short Stories and the Late Victorian Literary Marketplace 364
Peter Widdowson
25 Sequence and Series in Hardy's Poetry 378
Tim Armstrong
26 Hardy's Poems: The Scholarly Situation 395
William W. Morgan
27 That's Show Business: Spectacle, Narration, and Laughter in The Dynasts 413
G. Glen Wickens
Part V Hardy the Modern 431
28 Modernist Hardy: Hand-Writing in The Mayor of Casterbridge 433
J. Hillis Miller
29 Inhibiting the Voice: Thomas Hardy and Modern Poetics 450
Charles Lock
30 Hardy's Heirs: D. H. Lawrence and John Cowper Powys 465
Terry R. Wright
Index 479