Thomas Hardy and the Proper Study of Mankind [Paperback]

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. Under the Greenwood Tree or the Mellstock Quire?; Hardy's dances; The Return of the Native - character and the natural environment; The Trumpet-Major , A Laodicean and Two on a Tower - the man-made environment; The Mayor of Casterbridge - the fate of Michael Henchard's character; Tess of the D'Urbervilles ; Angel Clare's story; sex, marriage and the decline of traditional community in Jude the Obscure , together with a digression on the evils (or otherwise) of drink; From the White Sea to Cape Horn - Thomas Hardy and the wider world.