The mayor of casterbridge, paperback/thomas hardy

Description Backgrounds and Contexts provides new and invaluable source material on Victorian Dorset and, in particular, Dorchester, Hardys native home and the town upon which Casterbridge is based.

Included are six of Hardys nonfiction writings, notably excerpts from his essay The Dorsetshire Laboure (1883), in which he frankly comments on the social changes he has witnessed in the county.

Hardys Wessex is further examined in an essay by Michael Millgate, by maps of Casterbridge and Wessex, and by a key to local place names.

Christine Winfield discusses the novels manuscript and its complicated history.

Criticism collects seventeen wide-ranging assessments of the novel--six new to the Second Edition--from both contemporary and modern critics, including Virginia Woolf, Albert J.

Guerard, Julian Moynahan, John Paterson, Michael Millgate, Irving Howe, J.

Hillis Miller, Ian Gregor, Elaine Showalter, George Levine, William Greenslade, H.

Daleski, and Suzanne Keen.

A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.