Thomas Hardy's "Studies, Specimens &c." notebook, dating from the mid-1860s, preserves unique evidence of the studies of other writers and the self-assigned exercises in vocabulary-building and poetic techniques by which he so deliberately sought to make himself into a poet at the very beginning of his literary career. This edition presents the manuscript in quasi-facsimile, with full annotation of Hardy's sources, allusions, and intentions, as far as they can be interpreted.

Winner of the Thomas Hardy Society Book Prize.

Winner of the Thomas Hardy Society Book Prize.

From reviews of previous volumes "Has the qualities that a great edition should have: it is meticulously thorough and accurate, and its aids to the reader are clear and comprehensive."--Times Literary Supplement. "An indispensable work of scholarship."--Nineteenth-Century Fiction. The correspondents in this volume range widely--from Edmund Gosse and Walter de la Mare to Ezra Pound--and the letters show an aging Hardy still deeply involved in all aspects of his professional life The nearly 700 letters, most of which have never been published, are supplemented by scrupulous annotation and...

This seventh and final volume of the definitive edition of Thomas Hardy's letters contains more than 350 letters, most never before published, written during the last two years of Hardy's life. In addition to the usual scrupulous annotation and extensive cross-referencing, chronology, and recipient index, this final volume contains a number of earlier letters that became available too late to be included in earlier editions and a General Index covering texts and annotations found throughout the series.

Thomas Hardy has generally been viewed as an intensely private figure, shy of publicity and even of people. What the present volume reveals is that Hardy's public utterances, addressed to a wide range of literary, social, and political issues, were far more numerous and various than has previously been imagined. His essays, speeches, and other acknowledged pieces, both formal and informal, are here fully described, edited, and annotated, together with the letters he wrote to newspapers and the many unsigned items, from obituaries to clandestine contributions to literary gossip-columns, that...

In a series of essays written especially for this volume, five distinguished critics offer a range of approaches, discussing the novel in terms of its composition and position in Faulkner's career, its structure and narrative techniques, and its relation to the religious, racial, and sexual assumptions of the society it represents.

An annotated edition of a previously unpublished and almost unknown Hardy notebook, one of the very few to have survived. Biographically significant because of its preservation of personal notes from old pocket-books subsequently destroyed, 'Poetical Matter' is a unique late working notebook devoted to verse.

This is the long-awaited supplementary volume to the authoritative seven-volume edition of The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, edited by Michael Millgate and Richard Purdy, that was published by OUP between 1978 and 1988. Volume 8, edited by Millgate in collaboration with leading Hardy scholar Professor Keith Wilson, contains previously unpublished letters from all periods of Hardy's career, his earliest known letter among them. It introduces important new correspondents, throws fresh light on existing correspondences, and richly enhances the reader's understanding of both familiar and...