Upon its first appearance in 1895, Thomas Hardy?s Jude the Obscure shocked Victorian critics and readers with a frank depiction of sexuality and an unbridled indictment of the institutions of marriage, education, and religion, reportedly causing one Angli-can bishop to order the book publicly burned[...]

This text reprinted in this volume is based on Thomas Hardy's final revision for the 1912 Wessex Edition and includes his preface and postscript. "Backgrounds and Contexts" traces the textual history of "Jude the Obscure" through selections from Hardy's poems, autobiography, letters and journlistic [...]

In his most gripping thriller yet, Jeffery Deaver takes readers on a terrifying ride into two ingenious minds...that of a physically challenged detective and the scheming killer he must stop. The detective was the former head of forensics at the NYPD, but is now a quadriplegic who can only exercise [...]

Jude Fawley is a bright but impoverished stonemason who aspires to attend university and become a scholar. H is failure to fulfill the expectations of the two women he loves points to his final tragedy. Concerned with the destructive conventions of marriage and the English class system, Jude the Obs[...]

Thomas Hardy?s fiction has had a remarkably strong appeal for general readers for decades, and his poetry has been acclaimed as among the most influential of the twentieth century. His work still creates passionate advocacy and opposition. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy is an essential intr[...]

An immediate success when it was first published in 1874, Thomas Hardy's 'pastoral tale' of the wilful and capricious Bathsheba Everdene, her three suitors - the faithful shepherd Gabriel Oak, the lonely widower Farmer Boldwood, and the dashing but faithless Sergeant Troy - and the tragic consequenc[...]

'York Notes for GCSE' offers a useful approach to English Literature and aims to help readers achieve a better grade. Updated to reflect the needs of today's students, the new editions are filled with detailed summaries, commentaries on key themes, characters, language and style, illustrations, exam[...]

Because Thomas Hardy is so closely associated with the rural Wessex of his novels, stories, and poems, it is easy to forget that he was, in his own words, half a Londoner. Focusing on the formative five years in his early twenties when Hardy lived in the city, but also on his subsequent movement bac[...]

Eustacia Vye longs to escape from Egdon Heath, but the man she chooses to save her longs to stay. Out of their struggle, the unfulfilled passion of his heroine, and the daily rhythms of late-nineteenth-century rural life, Hardy builds a drama fully worthy of the magnificent stage on which he places [...]

In The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy, some of the most prominent Hardy specialists working today offer an overview of Hardy scholarship and suggest new directions in Hardy studies. The contributors cover virtually every area relevant to Hardy's fiction and poetry, including philosophy, [...]