Reading Thomas Hardy

George Levine is Professor Emeritus of English at Rutgers University, New Jersey and has published broadly on Victorian topics, including authoring Darwin and the Novelists (1988), How to Read the Victorian Novel (2007) and the award-winning Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge, 2008). He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot (Cambridge, 2001) and was co-editor of the journal Victorian Studies in its early years.

• 1. Shaping Hardy's art: vision, class, and sex; 2. Hardy and Darwin: an enchanting Hardy?; 3. The Mayor of Casterbridge: reversing the real; Interlude: Jude and the power of art; 4. From mindless matter to the art of the mind: The Well-Beloved; 5. The poetry of the novels.

'A wide range of readers will be attracted by the accessible style, moderate length, and reasonable price of Reading Thomas Hardy. Those less familiar with Hardy criticism will benefit from Levine's adept summaries of some of the major areas of debate, which cover questions of realism, style, respectability, narrative position, and observation. But, above all, this book will bring into critical view a more dynamic understanding of Hardy - a writer whose attentiveness to the natural world re-enchants his readers.' Jonathan Godshaw Memel, Modern Language Review