A Laodicean by Thomas Hardy

A Laodicean by Thomas Hardy

Though considered a minor novel, A Laodicean is crucial in Thomas Hardy's career, literary art, and exploration of nineteenth-century religious issues. This is the first authoritative variorum edition of the novel, featuring a full account of its history, references, sources, and literary-religious importance. It explores Hardy's interpretation of English religious culture and his engagement with the debate between Anglicanism, Catholicism, and secularism, woven not only through its treatment of Anglican-Catholic histories of place, but also through the love lives of the main characters, connected as these are with their gradual accommodation of innate secularism alongside their growing religious interest. Alongside extensive explanatory notes, an introductory essay provides new and enlightening insights into the novel's fascinating contexts and into the process of its composition, its reception, its various editions, and the novel's rich dialects and geographies.

Dennis Taylor is emeritus professor of English at Boston College and founding editor of Religion and the Arts. He has published extensively on Thomas Hardy, as well as editing a 1998 edition of Jude the Obscure (reissued 2003). He also edited, with David Beauregard, Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England (2003), and, most recently, is the author of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Reformation: Literary Negotiation of Religious Difference (2022).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781107046948
Title	A Laodicean
Author	Thomas Hardy
Series	The Cambridge Edition Of The Novels And Stories Of Thomas Hardy
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Year published	2026-08-31
Number of pages	750
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.