Thomas Hardy and the Proper Study of Mankind

Explores Hardy's account in fiction of the individual man or woman's relationship with various aspects of the encompassing world - with other individual men and women, with the aggregation known as society, with the natural and artificial environment and with the supernatural.

Inhalt
"Under the Greenwood Tree" or the Mellstock Quire?; Hardy's dances; "The Return of the Native" - character and the natural environment; "The Trumpet-Major", "A Laodicean" and "Two on a Tower" - the man-made environment; "The Mayor of Casterbridge" - the fate of Michael Henchard's character; "Tess of the D'Urbervilles"; Angel Clare's story; sex, marriage and the decline of traditional community in "Jude the Obscure", together with a digression on the evils (or otherwise) of drink; "From the White Sea to Cape Horn" - Thomas Hardy and the wider world.