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The Return of the Native (Norton Critical Editions)
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Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
Author: Thomas Hardy
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Our Price: $16.95
You Save: $ ( % )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
Author: Thomas Hardy
Publisher: W. W. Norton
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The Return of the Native (Norton Critical Editions) Description
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.8
EAN: 9780393927870
ISBN: 0393927873
Label: W. W. Norton
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 552
Publication Date: 2005-12-31
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Studio: W. W. Norton
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.8
EAN: 9780393927870
ISBN: 0393927873
Label: W. W. Norton
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 552
Publication Date: 2005-12-31
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Studio: W. W. Norton
Editorial Review of The Return of the Native (Norton Critical Editions)
This Second Edition reprints the text of the authoritative 1912 Macmillan Wessex Edition. It is accompanied by more than 500 editorial footnotes, many new to this edition, that provide essential historical background and glossing of dialect words. Also new to the Second Edition are the twelve illustrations from the novel's first serial publication and Hardy's "Sketch Map of the Scene of the Story," which accompanied the 1878 edition. Again included is the "Map of Wessex of the Novels and Poems" from the 1912 Macmillan Wessex Edition of The Mayor of Casterbridge.
"Backgrounds and Contexts" provides a useful "Glossary of Dialect Words" as well as four essays on the textual and publication history of the novel—including pieces by Simon Gatrell and Andrew Nash—all of which are newly included. Also included are six of Hardy's nonfiction writings on the dialect in the novel, the reading of fiction, and his correspondence, five of which are new to this edition.
"Criticism" provides a selection of contemporary reviews that suggest The Return of the Native's initial reception as well nine of the most influential modern essays on the novel, by Gillian Beer, D. H. Lawrence, Michael Wheeler, Rosemarie Morgan, Donald Davidson, John Peterson, Richard Swigg, Pamela Dalziel, and Jennifer Gribble.
A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.
About the Series: No other series of classic texts equals the caliber of the Norton Critical Editions. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with the comprehensive pedagogical apparatus necessary to appreciate the work fully. Careful editing, first-rate translation, and thorough explanatory annotations allow each text to meet the highest literary standards while remaining accessible to students. Each edition is printed on acid-free paper and every text in the series remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice for excellence in scholarship for students at more than 2,000 universities worldwide.
"Backgrounds and Contexts" provides a useful "Glossary of Dialect Words" as well as four essays on the textual and publication history of the novel—including pieces by Simon Gatrell and Andrew Nash—all of which are newly included. Also included are six of Hardy's nonfiction writings on the dialect in the novel, the reading of fiction, and his correspondence, five of which are new to this edition.
"Criticism" provides a selection of contemporary reviews that suggest The Return of the Native's initial reception as well nine of the most influential modern essays on the novel, by Gillian Beer, D. H. Lawrence, Michael Wheeler, Rosemarie Morgan, Donald Davidson, John Peterson, Richard Swigg, Pamela Dalziel, and Jennifer Gribble.
A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.
About the Series: No other series of classic texts equals the caliber of the Norton Critical Editions. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with the comprehensive pedagogical apparatus necessary to appreciate the work fully. Careful editing, first-rate translation, and thorough explanatory annotations allow each text to meet the highest literary standards while remaining accessible to students. Each edition is printed on acid-free paper and every text in the series remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice for excellence in scholarship for students at more than 2,000 universities worldwide.
Customer Reviews of The Return of the Native (Norton Critical Editions)
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: an edition with plenty of background information and some criticism
Review: The opening of the novel has so many ruts and hairpin bends that the reader is almost forbidden to progress. Schklovski says that "the crooked road, the road on which the foot senses the stones, the road which turns back on itself - this is the road of art". It is a device familiar in comic texts such as Tristam Shandy and in texts designed to maximize suspense such as the novels of Wilkie Collins, but deliberate as it seems to be here, its purpose is entirely ideological - it is to push the narratives, the lives of the individuals, to the side of a context which is as a whole immovable, levelling or, to use a word which is used at key moments of the text and which will be central to the novel, "obscuring". The novel is its own Promethean resistance to its metaphoric sublimation.
Yet once the story is initiated it proceeds with amazing single-mindedness. The obscuring perspective re-enters rather as a sequence of parenthetical closures on the crises of the narrative. Thus immediately after having decided on his wedding day with Eustacia, Clym feels overpowered by the flatness of the landscape. After he has discovered Eustacia's guilt, Clym is confronted with "the imperturbable countenance of the heath, which, having defied the cataclysmal onsets of centuries, reduced to insignificance by its seamed and antique features the wildest turmoil of a single man". (V.2).
The several allusion to Sophocles' Oedipus and to Greek tragedy in general, together with the general shape of the novel, its relative unity of shape and action, is sometimes taken to mean that Hardy is trying to write the modern equivalent of classical tragedy. But equally the "oppressive horizontality" and its reduction of man's emotional dramas to "insignificance" is taken to indicate that the deterministic ideology of the novel precludes the "dignity" of tragedy.
This was D.H. Lawrence's view, who in his essay on the psychology of the characters in Hardy's novels related these to Tolstoy's, and more indirectly to Shakespeare and Sophocles because of this switch of vision (from the heroic in Shopocles and Shakespeare to the "insignificant" in Tolstoy and Hardy). I would say that the heroic vision is only the Greek, since Shakespeare stands at the level of humanity; Tolstoy does move to an upward vision that renders the characters ridiculous. Hardy, in my opinion, alternates between the three perspectives, relying more heavily on the last. According to D. H. Lawrence: "There is a constant revelation in Hardy's novels that there exists a great background, vital and vivid, which matters more than the people who move upon it. Against the background of dark, passionate Egdon, is drawn the lesser scheme of lives. The vast, unexplored morality of life itself surrounds us in its eternal incomprehensibility, and in its midst goes on the little human morality play, with its mechanical movement." But there is no doubt that in his handling of the upward perspective Hardy presents itself as a seemingly unlikely precursor of much twentieth-century art, and an efficient, tasteful abridger between the old and the new.
Hardy is conscious of his role in introducing this new (in)version of the Greek mode: "The truth seems to be that a long line of disillusive centuries has permanently displaced the Hellenic idea of life, or whatever it might be called. (...) That old-fashioned revelling in the general situation grows less and less possible as we uncover the defects of natural laws, and see the quandary that man is in by their operation." (III.1) Clym himself describes Promethean rebelliousness as a phase he has grown out of.
On the other hand, the landscape of the heath is characterized as modern precisely because of its obscurity, which makes it one with the darkening spirit of human kind. It stands against the simple joy of the Hellenic, and is linked with the revival of interest in Nordic art and mythology which is found in Ruskin, Arnold and Morris. It is the landscape of the excluded, the "barbarous" - that which the Hellenic and post-Hellenic worlds ignore. This natural world is contrasted with civilization in the same way in which Eustacia is contrasted with Thomasin, who meets Venn by the old Roman road that crosses the heath.
Tragedy is therefore not heroic, but the result of the obscure determinism of nature, and is brought about by the interplay of human intention and chance. A minute instance of this technique is presented in the gambling on the heath. Christian compares chance with the magic work of the Devil: "That these little things should carry such luck, and such charm, and such a spell, and such power in 'em, passes all, ever heard or zeed." Human intention is carried away by mysterious forces: Wildeve originally intended to gamble so as to earn back his wife's money, but "as the minutes passed he had gradually drifted into a revengeful intention without knowing the precise moment of forming it." Ultimately, it is the reddleman, who is associated with the Devil since the beginning of the novel, who wins the game and eventually re-inclusion in the social order of the heath. Venn submits to the mysterious power of a higher will which is in agreement with his own: "He might have been an Arab, or an automaton; he would have been like a red-sandstone statue but for the motion of his arm like a dice-box." (III,8) Eustacia, the only superior, though limited, character in the novel, is seen to possess the attributes of a goddess, as seen on her influence on the child who keeps her bonfire. "The little slave went on feeding the fire as before. He seemed a mere automaton, galvanized into moving and speaking by the wayward Eustacia's will. He might have been the brass statue which Albertus Magnus is said to have animated just so far as to make it chatter, and move, and be his servant." (I,6) Still, Eustacia is heroic only in so far as she is the result of "a happy convergence of natural laws" (I,7); this is showing the influence of Darwin's Origin of the Species, and does much to discredit the orthodox tragic interpretation.
Together with this book you may like to read J. A. Symonds' The Greek Poets, where Symonds modifies Schlegel's description of Greek tragedy as a protest against fate and which Hardy extracted at some length. Also, Arnold's Literature and Dogma links the "Ishmaelitism" that is taken to characterize the heath with the modern cult of nature and with the ideal of Bohemian Paris.
Review Summary: an edition with plenty of background information and some criticism
Review: The opening of the novel has so many ruts and hairpin bends that the reader is almost forbidden to progress. Schklovski says that "the crooked road, the road on which the foot senses the stones, the road which turns back on itself - this is the road of art". It is a device familiar in comic texts such as Tristam Shandy and in texts designed to maximize suspense such as the novels of Wilkie Collins, but deliberate as it seems to be here, its purpose is entirely ideological - it is to push the narratives, the lives of the individuals, to the side of a context which is as a whole immovable, levelling or, to use a word which is used at key moments of the text and which will be central to the novel, "obscuring". The novel is its own Promethean resistance to its metaphoric sublimation.
Yet once the story is initiated it proceeds with amazing single-mindedness. The obscuring perspective re-enters rather as a sequence of parenthetical closures on the crises of the narrative. Thus immediately after having decided on his wedding day with Eustacia, Clym feels overpowered by the flatness of the landscape. After he has discovered Eustacia's guilt, Clym is confronted with "the imperturbable countenance of the heath, which, having defied the cataclysmal onsets of centuries, reduced to insignificance by its seamed and antique features the wildest turmoil of a single man". (V.2).
The several allusion to Sophocles' Oedipus and to Greek tragedy in general, together with the general shape of the novel, its relative unity of shape and action, is sometimes taken to mean that Hardy is trying to write the modern equivalent of classical tragedy. But equally the "oppressive horizontality" and its reduction of man's emotional dramas to "insignificance" is taken to indicate that the deterministic ideology of the novel precludes the "dignity" of tragedy.
This was D.H. Lawrence's view, who in his essay on the psychology of the characters in Hardy's novels related these to Tolstoy's, and more indirectly to Shakespeare and Sophocles because of this switch of vision (from the heroic in Shopocles and Shakespeare to the "insignificant" in Tolstoy and Hardy). I would say that the heroic vision is only the Greek, since Shakespeare stands at the level of humanity; Tolstoy does move to an upward vision that renders the characters ridiculous. Hardy, in my opinion, alternates between the three perspectives, relying more heavily on the last. According to D. H. Lawrence: "There is a constant revelation in Hardy's novels that there exists a great background, vital and vivid, which matters more than the people who move upon it. Against the background of dark, passionate Egdon, is drawn the lesser scheme of lives. The vast, unexplored morality of life itself surrounds us in its eternal incomprehensibility, and in its midst goes on the little human morality play, with its mechanical movement." But there is no doubt that in his handling of the upward perspective Hardy presents itself as a seemingly unlikely precursor of much twentieth-century art, and an efficient, tasteful abridger between the old and the new.
Hardy is conscious of his role in introducing this new (in)version of the Greek mode: "The truth seems to be that a long line of disillusive centuries has permanently displaced the Hellenic idea of life, or whatever it might be called. (...) That old-fashioned revelling in the general situation grows less and less possible as we uncover the defects of natural laws, and see the quandary that man is in by their operation." (III.1) Clym himself describes Promethean rebelliousness as a phase he has grown out of.
On the other hand, the landscape of the heath is characterized as modern precisely because of its obscurity, which makes it one with the darkening spirit of human kind. It stands against the simple joy of the Hellenic, and is linked with the revival of interest in Nordic art and mythology which is found in Ruskin, Arnold and Morris. It is the landscape of the excluded, the "barbarous" - that which the Hellenic and post-Hellenic worlds ignore. This natural world is contrasted with civilization in the same way in which Eustacia is contrasted with Thomasin, who meets Venn by the old Roman road that crosses the heath.
Tragedy is therefore not heroic, but the result of the obscure determinism of nature, and is brought about by the interplay of human intention and chance. A minute instance of this technique is presented in the gambling on the heath. Christian compares chance with the magic work of the Devil: "That these little things should carry such luck, and such charm, and such a spell, and such power in 'em, passes all, ever heard or zeed." Human intention is carried away by mysterious forces: Wildeve originally intended to gamble so as to earn back his wife's money, but "as the minutes passed he had gradually drifted into a revengeful intention without knowing the precise moment of forming it." Ultimately, it is the reddleman, who is associated with the Devil since the beginning of the novel, who wins the game and eventually re-inclusion in the social order of the heath. Venn submits to the mysterious power of a higher will which is in agreement with his own: "He might have been an Arab, or an automaton; he would have been like a red-sandstone statue but for the motion of his arm like a dice-box." (III,8) Eustacia, the only superior, though limited, character in the novel, is seen to possess the attributes of a goddess, as seen on her influence on the child who keeps her bonfire. "The little slave went on feeding the fire as before. He seemed a mere automaton, galvanized into moving and speaking by the wayward Eustacia's will. He might have been the brass statue which Albertus Magnus is said to have animated just so far as to make it chatter, and move, and be his servant." (I,6) Still, Eustacia is heroic only in so far as she is the result of "a happy convergence of natural laws" (I,7); this is showing the influence of Darwin's Origin of the Species, and does much to discredit the orthodox tragic interpretation.
Together with this book you may like to read J. A. Symonds' The Greek Poets, where Symonds modifies Schlegel's description of Greek tragedy as a protest against fate and which Hardy extracted at some length. Also, Arnold's Literature and Dogma links the "Ishmaelitism" that is taken to characterize the heath with the modern cult of nature and with the ideal of Bohemian Paris.