'Flawed Icons and Verbal Texts: Textual Criticism and the Cambridge Edition of the Novels and Stories of Thomas Hardy'

This event will be presented via a recording

A THS Conference/Festival Lecture by Professor Richard Nemesvari

Monday 25th July at 3.00pm - The United Church, Dorchester

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This presentation, the opening keynote lecture of the conference, will provide a brief history of textual criticism, along with a short summary of the different approaches and theories available to contemporary scholarly editing. It will then discuss the method taken to produce the Cambridge Edition of the Novels and Stories of Thomas Hardy, with examples from the four volumes currently in print (Desperate Remedies, Under the Greenwood Tree, The Woodlanders, The Return of the Native) demonstrating the unique issues and challenges involved in editing Hardy's prose fiction.

Richard Nemesvari is Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. He has published extensively on Hardy's life and works, and is the General Editor overseeing the Cambridge Edition of the Novels and Stories of Thomas Hardy, for which he personally edited Desperate Remedies. His many other publications include: Thomas Hardy, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011 and The Trumpet-Major, Thomas Hardy, Edited with Introduction and Notes. Oxford World’s Classics Series, Oxford University Press, 1991. Second imprint 1998.