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Short Fiction Of Thomas Hardy: An Exploration And Assessment, Rebecca G. Peters

Senior Scholar Papers

Hardy's novels and poetry have received extensive criticism, in due proportion to their merit. Hardy's short stories, however, have been virtually excluded from the annals of Hardy criticism, even though Hardy wrote over forty short stories, several of which are truly outstanding. In part, the reason for this neglect is because of the neglected state of the short story in Victorian England. Short fiction, published mainly only in periodicals and never collected in volume form, was obscured to a large extent by the highly popular serial novel. This thesis examines Thomas Hardy's short stories in the context of both the …