Annotated Critical Bibliography of Hardy

Book Reviews who sacrifices herself, with the one in Cathleen ni Houlihan, who demands that others sacrifice themselves to her.) Despite my reservations—mainly about the book's limitations rather than about the ideas set forth in it—Terrible Beauty is an intelligent and well-documented study that merits attention for its unfolding of the contradictions inherent in Ireland's political mythology and for its careful and balanced readings of the works. Patrick A. McCarthy University of Miami Annotated Critical Bibliography of Hardy Ronald P. Draper and Martin Ray. An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Thomas Hardy. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1989. 227 pp. $34.50 A REFERENCE WORK of this size and scope has long been needed. The two volumes edited by Helmut E. Gerber and W Eugene Davis, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 1973 and 1983, provide valuable—and sometimes very hard to get—information about almost 6,000 items, but are insufficiently discriminating; it is difficult to tell just what the editors think about a given item, or whether the item is worth looking up. The overreaching of these volumes inevitably provoked censure that this or that had been omitted at the expense of trivia that had been included. Moreover, scholarship of great value has been published since 1983 (including the completion of the great edition of the Letters). H. A. T. Johnson, Michael Millgate, Richard H. Taylor, Maurice Beebe, and George S. Fayen, Jr., have produced useful bibliographies, but some of them are annual affairs (meaning that one has to read through several periodicals or books in order to be sure that everything has been covered), and inevitably all of them age and decline in usefulness. Such will be the fate of Draper and Ray's work, but for the immediate moment, and possibly for a full decade to come, this will be the best single place to send students for a quick view of the critical terrain. The survey is, of course, selective, but the seventeen sections, arranged alphabetically and numbered in continuous sequence, enable a reader to look up particular publications of interest, or authors, or "themes and areas of Hardy criticism," with surprising ease. Thus, the editors make no effort to identify all the important editions of Hardy's works, on the assumption (unspoken) that Richard Purdj^s bibliography is readily at hand. Only "recent editions" are listed, but 221 ELT: Volume 33:2, 1990 since a strong case can be made for the textual inadequacy of most editions published before 1970, the titles that are described here have a fuller scholarly apparatus than almost anything cited by Purdy. There are lists of biographies and biographical materials; background materials; collections of essays and an impressive number of fulllength studies; individual bibliographies of secondary materials on both the major and the minor novels; a list of writings about the shorter fiction (which seems to be coming into its own); a fascinating section on the poetry, which provides a reader with some quantitative checks on an impression that Hardy's status as a major poet is finally secure (and this is followed by a list of writings on The Dynasts); and a thirty-page section describing criticism on Darwin and science, narrative technique, textual studies, language and style, Hardy and women (a growth industry), Hardy and religion (only two items!), Hardy and philosophy, Hardy and other writers, Florence Hardy's The Life of Thomas Hardy, Wessex and regionalism, Hardy's reading, Hardy and the other arts, nature and landscape, Hardy and social change, the pastoral, and miscellaneous (this last category encompassing some of the shrewdest and best criticism). The fact that Harvester Wheatsheaf in England commissioned this book (rather than the University of Michigan Press) means that some subtle and probably inevitable weighting of the balance in favor of English publications has taken place. The importance of several American publications may not be fully appreciated across the Atlantic . An objection may be raised also to the failure to enumerate fully the contents of several collections of secondary materials; this failing matches another failing, a willingness to settle for an unemotional, excessively terse description of an item that is listed, which provides...