This illustrated ultimate collection gathers the full breadth of Thomas Hardy's achievement: fifteen novels, fifty-three short stories, and more than 650 poems, tracing one of Victorian and early modern literature's most distinctive imaginative worlds. From the tragic landscapes of Wessex in Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure to the compressed ironies of the tales and the elegiac intensity of the poetry, Hardy's art fuses realism, fatalism, pastoral memory, and philosophical skepticism. The volume reveals his movement from nineteenth-century social fiction toward a modernist consciousness shaped by doubt, desire, and historical change. Hardy, born in rural Dorset in 1840 and trained as an architect, brought to literature an acute sense of place, structure, and social constraint. His intimate knowledge of village life, class mobility, religious decline, and the pressures placed upon women profoundly informed his fiction. After hostile reactions to his later novels, he turned chiefly to poetry, where his austere lyric voice found enduring power. This collection is ideal for readers seeking Hardy entire: novelist, storyteller, poet, moral anatomist, and chronicler of vanished rural England. This enriched edition has been carefully crafted to add value to your reading experience. - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era-social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand-picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
Autorentext
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism.
Klappentext
This carefully crafted ebook collection is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents: Novels: Under the Greenwood Tree Far from the Madding Crowd The Return of the Native The Mayor of Casterbridge The Woodlanders Tess of the d'Urbervilles Jude the Obscure A Pair of Blue Eyes The Trumpet-Major Two on a Tower The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid The Well-Beloved Desperate Remedies The Hand of Ethelberta A Laodicean Short Stories: Wessex Tales An Imaginative Woman The Three Strangers The Withered Arm Fellow-Townsmen Interlopers at the Knap The Distracted Preacher Life's Little Ironies The Son's Veto For Conscience' Sake A Tragedy of Two Ambitions On the Western Circuit To Please His Wife The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four The Fiddler of the Reels A Few Crusted Characters Tony Kytes, the Arch-deceiver The History of the Hardcomes The Superstitious Man's Story Andrey Satchel and the Parson and Clerk Old Andrey's Experience as a Musician Absent-Mindedness in a Parish Choir The Winters and the Palmleys Incident in Mr. Crookhill's Life Netty Sargent's Copyhold A Group of Noble Dames The First Countess of Wessex Barbara of the House of Grebe The Marchioness of Stonehenge Lady Mottisfont The Lady Icenway Squire Petrick's Lady Anna, Lady Baxby The Lady Penelope The Duchess of Hamptonshire The Honourable Laura A Changed Man and Other Tales Other Stories Drama: The Dynasts Poetry Collections: Wessex Poems and Other Verses Poems of the Past and the Present Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses Satires of Circumstance Moments of Vision Late Lyrics and Earlier Other Works: The Dorsetshire Labourer The Rev. William Barnes, B.D. The Science of Fiction The Profitable Reading of Fiction Candour in English Fiction and more