The Hidden Hardy

Focusing on narrative structure, irony, satire and allusion, The Hidden Hardy offers a radical new perspective on Thomas Hardy's novels. Hardy's own accounts of himself and his work have long been seen as calculated impostures; it is argued here that the same qualities are not only present in his novels, but are critical factors in the way they are made. The respectable and acceptable surfaces are the impostures, masking hidden texts which are extremely hostile to established social, economic and cultural structures.

Inhalt
Acknowledgements - Introduction: Hardy and the Conjurors - Desperate Remedies (1871): Making the Trojan Horse - Far from the Madding Crowd (1874): Priapus in Arcadia - The Hand of Ethelberta (1875): The Writer's Contract - The Return of the Native (1878): Anarchy and Tragedy - A Laodicean (1881): The End of Laodiceanism - The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886): Civilisation and the Field - The Woodlanders (1887): Growth and Self-Destruction - Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891): Reformation or G tterd mmerung? - Jude the Obscure (1895): The Ultimate Satire - Afterword - Index