Authors: Thomas Hardy, Marcelle Clements
ISBN-13: 9780451530271, ISBN-10: 0451530276
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Date Published: September 2006
Edition: Reissue
Victorian novelist and poet Thomas Hardy focused much of his work -- including classics like Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) on man's futile struggle against unseen forces. Of his rather unromantic outlook on life, Hardy once said, "Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed."
A ne'er-do-well exploits his gentle daughter's beauty for social advancement in Thomas Hardy's compelling masterpiece of tragic fiction.
Hardy's classic 1891 novel, about a young woman's attempt at redemption following a scandal, demonstrates his fatalistic view regarding free will. Audie® Award winner Simon Vance's reading is straightforward, well paced, and clear, even when the characters speak in West Country dialect. This is an excellent choice for public libraries wanting to boost their classics collections, and the accompanying fulltext PDF ebook (which can be played in tandem with the MP3 recording) makes it useful also for high school and academic libraries. [Audio clip available through
About the Series | ||
About This Volume | ||
Pt. 1 | Tess of the d'Urbervilles: The Complete Text | |
The Complete Text | 19 | |
Pt. 2 | Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism | |
A Critical History of Tess of the d'Urbervilles | 387 | |
The New Historicism and Tess of the d'Urbervilles | 405 | |
Tess of the d'Urbervilles: Hardey's Anthropology of the Novel | 422 | |
Feminist and Gender Criticism and Tess of the d'Urbervilles | 441 | |
Tess and the Subject of Sexual Violence: Reading, Rape, Seduction | 462 | |
Deconstruction and Tess of the d'Urbervilles | 484 | |
Echoic Language, Uncertainty, and Freedom in Tess of the d'Urbervilles | 506 | |
Reader-Response Criticism and Tess of the d'Urbervilles | 521 | |
"Driven Well Home to the Reader's Heart": Tess's Implicated Audience | 537 | |
Cultural Criticism and Tess of the d'Urbervilles | 552 | |
The Same and the Different: Standards and Standardization in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles | 571 | |
Glossary of Critical and Theoretical Terms | 591 | |
About the Contributors | 605 |