The text reprinted in this volume is based on Hardy's final revisionfor the 1912 Wessex Edition and includes his Preface and Postscript. The novel is fully annotated and is accompanied by
Hardy's map ofWessex and a plan of late Victorian Oxford (the Christminster of thenovel).
The textual history of Jude the Obscure--including an account of thesurviving manuscript showing Hardy's major change of intention duringits composition, of the pressure to bowdlerize
the novel, and of thesubsequent restoration and revisions--is traced in a series of extractsfrom Hardy's writings as well as from those of his contemporaries andof modern scholars Richard
Little Purdy, John Paterson, and Robert C.Slack.
Selections from Hardy's poems, autobiography, letters, and journalisticwritings provide a background to the novel. Autobiographical elementsand the social climate of the period in which
Hardy lived and wrote arediscussed by C. J. Weber and W. R. Rutland, and Hardy's use of localeis explored in a section prepared specially for this edition.
"Contemporary Reception" provides a selection of reviews. "ModernCriticism" is provided by Irving Howe, Arthur Mizener, A. Alvarez, J.I. M. Stewart, Harvey Curtis Webster, D. H. Lawrence,
Albert J.Guerard, Robert Gittings, Frederick P. W. McDowell, and Emma Clifford.
A Selected Bibliography is included.
