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Mischaracterizing the Environment: Hardy, Darwin, and the Art of Ecological Storytelling
- Texas Studies in Literature and Language
- University of Texas Press
- Volume 62, Number 2, Summer 2020
- pp. 149-177
- Article
- Additional Information
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abstract:
This article reads Hardy's representation of Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native (1878) against the ecology and environmental history of English heathland to challenge a growing consensus that sees Hardy as an ecological thinker. Hardy's writings fall short of ecological understanding, I argue, because his vision of humans entangled with an animated but deeply inhuman landscape creates affective and scalar tensions that falsely cast interspecies interdependence as ominous and alienating.