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It relates the formal choices imposed on Hardy as contributor to no fewer than twenty-four separate periodicals to the methods he employed to encode in fiction his troubled attitude towards the social and cultural politics of the West Country, where most of the stories are set. There is also a close examination of the extent to which the stories bring out, more pervasively than the novels, the problems of author/reader relations that reached a critical phase for Hardy in the 1890s. No previous study has shown how the powerful challenge to readerly competence mounted in the stories reveals the complexity of Hardy’s motivations during a period when he was moving progressively in the direction of exchanging fiction for poetry.  \nIt is partly because our study has an historical bearing that we have chosen to deal with the stories in chronological order of publication. But there is another, more compelling, rationale: a particular feature of Hardy’s career as a short-story writer is the close relationship he establishes between many (not all) stories in each individual volume. Apart from the situation with A Changed Man, this reflects his practice of collecting into each volume material written within the same relatively short period of time; that chronological condensation often entails historical coherence of precisely the kind that our study is orientated towards.  \nChapter 1 is concerned with Wessex Tales, whose stories provide vivid instances of the nature of Hardy’s ‘telescopic’ vision, drawing attention to the wide and extended context of landscape in its temporal and spatial aspects, while also focusing in on the details of personal circumstance; combining awareness of both far and near, often counterpointing the evidence of marks on the landscape with that of marks on the body. This  \nviii Preface  \nmediation between what seems most present to the senses and what seems most remote has implications for the fictional presentation of setting, incident and character, and most especially for the relationship between author, narrator and reader. Many of Hardy’s stories claim an origin in local traditions, and articulate their relationship to those originsand to the destination of a present-day readership in the layering of narrative and the invocation of prior authorities, sometimes a variety of different sources. The production of sophisticated written texts on the basis of remembered anecdotes raises far-reaching questions about the cultural status of literary work that proposes itself as the last in a series of successive versions, the one that gives definition and finish to the oral convention of improvisation. In Wessex Tales, Hardy published the earliest instances of something he returns to periodically in the short-story genre, revealing his fascination with the N","cbCaij0d1PSH4Eup","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaij0d1PSH4Eup","pdf",5657640,162,"English","# Preface\n# A Critical Study\n## Wessex Tales\n## A Group of Noble Dames\n## Life’s Little Ironies\n## A Changed Man\n# Select Bibliography\n# Index","[{\"question\":\"What does the study focus on across Hardy’s short stories?\",\"answer\":\"It provides close readings of individual texts and also explains the ruling preoccupations and recurrent writing strategies that shape the whole corpus.\"},{\"question\":\"Why does the book arrange its chapters in chronological order?\",\"answer\":\"It offers an historical rationale for following publication order, and it also reflects how Hardy often establishes close relationships among stories collected within each volume.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the study connect Hardy’s storytelling to author/reader relations?\",\"answer\":\"It examines how the stories mount a challenge to readerly competence, revealing the complexity of Hardy’s motivations in the 1890s as he shifted toward exchanging fiction for poetry.\"}]","Thomas Hardy’s Shorter Fiction - A Critical Study | PDF",1789987396,249]