Hardy's Wessex, according to T.R.Wright, is a world dominated by desire which anticipates not only Freud, Hardy's contemporary, but such radical modern thinkers as Barthes, Foucault and Lacan, whose ideas are summarized in the opening chapters.

The wide-ranging and lively essays in Reading Thomas Hardy will appeal to anyone interested in Hardy. Specialists and Hardy enthusiasts will find a showcase for the work of many of the world's leading Hardy scholars. Subjects covered include Hardy the writer and Hardy the man, individual texts and wider themes, and Hardy's relationships to other artists. Whether presenting new research, embodying the best of traditional approaches, or challenging the reader with new interpretations, all the papers are authoritative and accessible.

The women in Thomas Hardy's novels appear to have no control over their conduct or their destiny. In this book, Rosemarie Morgan argues a contrary case. Hardy's women struggle, sometimes winning, often losing, but they are not tame objects to be manipulated. Their resistance emerges in their sexuality, a quality which Hardy was often forced to cloak or disguise. Rosemarie Morgan resurrects Hardy's voluptuous heroines and restores to them the physical, sexual reality which Hardy sees as their birthright, but which the male-dominated world they inhabit seeks to deny them, both within and beyond the novel.

This Reader's Guide analyses the critical history of two of Hardy's major tragic novels, from the time of their publication to the present. Simon Avery traces the changing critical fortunes of the texts and explores the diverse range of interpretations produced by different theoretical approaches.

A portrait of the enigmatic nineteenth-century novelist and poet discusses his humble origins, rise through the London literary scene, and efforts to guard his privacy.

Drawing on a broad concept of desire, informed by poststructuralist theorists this book examines the range of Hardy's work. It demonstrates the sustained nature of his thinking about desire, its relationship to the social and symbolic network in which human subjectivity is constituted and art's potential to offer fulfilment to the desiring subject.

In this profoundly original and far-reaching study, Robert M. Polhemus shows how novels have helped to make erotic love a matter of faith in modern life. Erotic faith, Polhemus argues, is an emotional conviction—ultimately religious in nature—that meaning, value, hope, and even the possibility of transcendence can be found in love. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, Polhemus shows the reciprocity of love as subject, the novel as form, and faith as motive in important works by Jane Austen, Walter Scott, the Brontës, Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett. Throughout, Polhemus relates the novelists' representation of love to that of such artists as Botticelli, Vermeer, Claude Lorrain, Redon, and Klimt. Juxtaposing their paintings with nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts both reveals the ways in which novels develop and individualize common erotic and religious themes and illustrates how the novel has influenced our perception of all art.