The Return Of The Native (Worldview Critical Editions)

"Bungalow Road, Delhi-110007. Printed In India. Price: Pic ""The Hardy Players' outside Riverside villa, 1921. This critical edition of Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878) prints the text of the 1912 'Wessex Edition' which most scholars generally consider the ""definitive' version as it incorporates Hardy's final revisions. The text is supplemented with fairly extensive 'Notes' and also with relevant quotations from Hardy's letters and his disguised autobiography. A few of Hardy's own poems are included in the belief that they can offer interesting insights into the major themes and human relationships at the heart of this novel. Hardy's 'General Preface' to the 1912 Wessex Edition along with three of his important essays on the art of fiction are here reprinted in full. The critical section opens with a selection of contemporary (i.e. 1878-79) reviews of The Return of the Native, followed by seven landmarks essays - representing different critical approaches -from the post-1970 critical analyses of this novel which ranks as Hardy's first great tragedy, foreshadowing later tragic masterpieces like The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). Shanta Dutta is a Reader in the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Calcutta. She did her Ph.D. on Thomas Hardy from the University of Leicester (UK), on a Commonwealth Scholarship. Her book Ambivalence in Handy A Study of bis Attitude to Women was published in 2000 by Macmillan (UK) and St Martin's Press (USA). She is a Vice-President of The Thomas Hardy Association (USA)."