Recent Hardy Criticism Ralph Pite* University of Cardiff Abstract This article offers a survey of recent Hardy criticism (focussing on books by Jo Devereux, David Musselwhite, Edward Neill,Andrew Radford and T. R. Wright and a collection of essays edited by Tim Dolin and Peter Widdowson). It sets these in the context of how Hardy studies have developed over the last twenty years or so and suggests a number of directions that future research might take. For a moment pause:– Just here it was ‘The Mound’, Winter Words (Hardy 843) In Hardy studies too, the wall came down around 1989. Peter Widdowson’s Hardy in History: A Study in Literary Sociology (1989), plus a number of feminist studies – Rosemarie Morgan’s Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (1988), Patricia Ingham, Thomas Hardy: A Feminist Reading (1989), Marjorie Garson’s Hardy’s Fables of Integrity: Woman, Body, Text (1991), and M. R. Higonnet’s edited collection, The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy (1993) – along with several considerations of ‘outsider’ Hardy (Lance St John Butler’s collection, Alternative Hardy [1989] and Joe Fisher’s lively The Hidden Hardy [1992]) collectively shifted the critical focus. Before that, despite Pamela Boumelha’s excellent work, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form (1982), Hardy studies were still by and large dominated by major 1970s accounts – by Hillis Miller’s, Ian Gregor’s, and John Bayley’s – and his work remained more starkly divided between major and minor than that of any other novelist. Richard Taylor countered this hierarchy in his The Neglected Hardy: Thomas Hardy’s Lesser Novels (1982) but could not remove the labelling. Meanwhile, the poetry (especially the 1912–13 poems) had been revived in Larkin’s The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Verse (1973) and placed above the novels by Davie’s Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1973) – an assessment that became a conventional wisdom in part because it suited the conservative strain in 1980s literary culture, and in English culture more broadly at that time. John Goode’s Thomas Hardy: The Offensive Truth (1988) and George Wotton’s Thomas Hardy: Towards a Materialist Critique (1985) helped prompt the late 1980s and early 1990s challenge to critical orthodoxy about Hardy; © Blackwell Publishing 2006 Literature Compass 4/1 (2007): 284–297, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00386.x