The essays collected here range widely over Hardy's career as both a novelist and a lyric poet. They offer fresh reading of individual works - including his last novel, The Well-Beloved, and his first collection of verse, Wessex Poems - as well as exploring such central topics as the nature of storytelling, and the relations between poetry and song. Challenging, lucid and accessible, these essays provide new insight into the achievement of Thomas Hardy.

This is a study of the forces and influences that shaped Kipling's work, including his unusual family background, his role as the laureate of empire and the deaths of two of his children, and of his complex relations with a literary world that first embraced and then rejected him.

Backgrounds and Contexts provides a useful "Glossary of Dialect Words" as well as four essays on the textual and publication history of the novel--including pieces by Simon Gatrell and Andrew Nash--all of which are newly included. Also included are six of Hardy's nonfiction writings on the dialect in the novel, the reading of fiction, and his correspondence, five of which are new to this edition Criticism provides a selection of contemporary reviews that suggestThe Return of the Native's initial reception as well nine of the most influential modern essays on the novel, by Gillian...

In Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts distinguished critics from Canada, Japan, the USA and the UK, offer fresh and challenging readings of Hardy's works. They also raise far wider and far-reaching questions about Hardy's attitude to his art, his relation to such contemporary forms as melodrama, and his response to the ongoing scientific debates, from Darwin to Einstein, about sexuality, personal identity, the meaning of suicide and the nature of time.

Palgrave Advances in Thomas Hardy Studies explores the key issues in the ongoing and lively debate about Thomas Hardy's work as a novelist and poet. In twelve newly-commissioned essays, distinguished scholars from both sides of the Atlantic review, take issue with and take forward the most recent and significant research on Thomas Hardy.

This is a study of the forces and influences that shaped Kipling's work, including his unusual family background, his role as the laureate of empire and the deaths of two of his children, and of his complex relations with a literary world that first embraced and then rejected him.