This study examines Hardy's prolonged struggle with his contemporary readers, whose bourgeois values he despised. Initially content to compromise, to provide them with congenial entertainment, Hardy resorted at first to strategies of subversion, smuggling material past his editors and finally to outspoken attack. Professor T. R. Wright attempts to balance historical research into the response of 'actual' readers and the material conditions of publishing with literary-critical analysis of the 'implied' reader inscribed in the novels themselves.

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Hardy's Contemporary Readers: Some Introductory Questions 'Breaking into Fiction': The Tinsley Novels The Cornhill Stories: 'Healthy Reading for the British Public'? Middling Hardy: Reconsidering His Readers Graphic Tragedies: Writing for Two Audiences Phase the Last: Farewell to Fiction References Index

T.R. WRIGHT studied at Oxford and Princeton before becoming Professor of English Literature at the University of Newcastle. His books include The Religion of Humanity, Theology and Literature, Hardy and the Erotic, George Eliot's Middlemarch and D.H. Lawrence and the Bible.