Publisher's Synopsis
This text 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. It also proposes that the full titles Hardy gave to a number of his novels have not been sufficiently attended to as signs of instinct with meaning. The book concentrates on eight of Hardy's 14 novels and has a new focus on the revisions Hardy made to his text. Simon Gatrell has also written "Hardy the Creator: A textual Biography", "The Ends of the Earth" (Volume Four of "English Literature and the Wider World") and a bibliography of George Crabbe (with Tony Barham).
