Hardy in His Time

BOOK REVIEWS prophetic science fiction as a new form of historiography" (79). This kind of generic insight, alert to history and to the history of literature, informed by a deep knowledge of Wells and of other writers, helps us begin to rethink the real issues of Wells's importance. Had the whole book been of the caliber of this chapter, it would change our sense of Wells. But Shadows of the Future also seems to want to cover dutifully all of Wells, and it repeatedly dilutes its thesis. Thus, in the chapter on Wells's prophetic modes, one is surprised to find a two-paragraph discussion of The Croquet Player but this enigmatic tale is not explored very deeply, and it hardly adds to our understanding of prophecy. It is commonly true that authors perceived as minor are preserved in their minor status by a thin tradition of criticism that, because it cannot trust its readership to be familiar with the subject, spends much time summarizing and reiterating elementary facts and critical commonplaces rather than refining, challenging, or deepening readings. Shadows of the Future covers much familiar territory, more I think than it needs to, and even when it poses a provocative thesis, it does not situate it in a modern critical context. Reading this book one would hardly know that there is an on-going critical project on Wells, much of it sponsored by Parrinder himself. Yet, if he may have missed a chance to change the way we think and talk about Wells, Parrinder's book nevertheless makes an excellent introduction to this underappreciated writer and identifies broadly an aspect of his work that sets him apart from his more canonized contemporaries. John Huntington ___________ University of Illinois at Chicago Hardy in His Time Timothy Hands. Thomas Hardy. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995. xih + 209 pp. $39.95 CONSISTENT WITH THE AIM of the Writers in Their Time series to provide an alternative to the ahistorical bias of some common approaches to modern literary study, Timothy Hands's Thomas Hardy focuses on the various ways that Hardy's texts are related to the historical contexts in which they were created. Although the dust jacket blurb proclaims that this volume is intended for the "specialist and general reader alike," in fact, it is students and general readers to whom it seems primarily addressed. Even the choice of texts for citation testifies that this is a study not aimed at scholarly specialists: Hands chose to use the Macmillan "New Wessex" edition of 1975-1978, which, 353 ELT 39:3 1996 as Michael Millgate has warned, "is neither a scholarly edition nor an adequate substitute for the Wessex Edition itself." But for the readership to which it is in fact aimed and the purpose that it addresses, Hands's study provides a lucidly written, even-handed, and generally reliable introduction that concentrates on the historical contexts of the seven best-known of Hardy's fourteen novels and provides a similarly useful consideration of perhaps one-thirtieth of his poetic production. Hands has structured his survey by dividing it into six major parts: "The Lives of Thomas Hardy," "Hardy and the Romantics," "Hardy and Contemporary Society," "Hardy and the Ideas of His Time," "Hardy and the Other Arts," and "The Critics of Thomas Hardy." In addition to endnotes, he provides a chronology of events in Hardy's life and a bibliography. Both are very brief, and the bibliography is somewhat eccentric. It includes, for example, some early works of very limited utility, such as Vere H. Collins's Talks with Thomas Hardy (1928), but not Simon Gatrell's Thomas Hardy and the Proper Study of Mankind (1993). Similarly, Hands cites John Paterson's now largely discredited textual study, The Making of 'The Return of the Native' (1960), but ignores important recent textual scholarship such as Rosemarie Morgan 's Cancelled Words: Rediscovering Thomas Hardy (1992). The General Editor's preface claims that volumes in this series will provide not lip-service to historical "backgrounds" but, rather, studies of the "crucial determinants of the very nature of the texts themselves." But Hands's Thomas Hardy is in fact a relatively conventional survey...