The Mayor of Casterbridge (Penguin Classics)
内容简介
A haunting study of guilt and lost love
In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. Over the course of the following years, he manages to establish himself as a respected and prosperous pillar of the community of Casterbridge, but behind his success there always lurk the shameful secret of his past and a personality prone to self-destructive pride and temper. Subtitled "A Story of a Man of Character," Hardy's powerful and sympathetic study of the heroic but deeply flawed Henchard is also an intensely dramatic work, tragically played out against the vivid backdrop of a close-knit Dorsetshire town.
This edition includes an introduction, chronology of Hardy's life and works, the illustrations for the original serial issue, place names, maps, glossary, full explanatory notes as well as Hardy's prefaces to the 1895 and 1912 editions.
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作者简介
Thomas Hardy, OM (2 June 1840 - 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth. Charles Dickens was another important influence. Like Dickens, he was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society.
While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, therefore, he gained fame as the author of novels, including Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). Hardy's poetry, though prolific, was not as well received during his lifetime. It was rediscovered in the 1950s, when Hardy's poetry had a significant influence on the Movement poets of the 1950s and 1960s, including Philip Larkin.
Most of his fictional works - initially published as serials in magazines - were set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex. They explored tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances. Hardy's Wessex is based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom and eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in southwest and south central England.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Bain News Service, publisher [Public domain, Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
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目录
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读书文摘
看过了方才帐篷里面的那一幕，现在面对这眼前这片景象，便自然而然地生出一种感触，认为人类是和善宇宙中的一个污点，令人厌弃。不过在仔细想一想，事件的各种情况原都是间歇性的，在某些个夜晚，人类都很纯真地沉入梦乡，那些安详沉静的东西却扰攘骚乱，高盛咆哮。
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