Under the Greenwood Tree

• A new edition of one of Hardy's best-loved novels, a love story played out in a rural community whose church choir is under threat.
• Introduction explores the tension in the novel between a vanishing rural idyll and the social realities making change inevitable; the novel's portrait of rural life and character; its revealing textual history and the relation of art to elegy.
• Useful notes provide historical background, gloss dialect and unfamiliar terms, and highlight significant revisions.
• Includes maps of Hardy's Wessex and the fictional setting of Mellstock.
• Thorough Chronology and up-to-date Bibliography.
• Critically established text restores Hardy's original intentions.

New to this edition

• New introduction by Phillip Mallett.
• New, expanded notes. Both introduction and notes take account of recent critical discussion in the 27 years since the edition was first published.
• New select bibliography.
• Novel reset, but retains the critically established text.

Readership: Readers of classic fiction, rural literature, Thomas Hardy; students of the novel, nineteenth-century literature, pastoral fiction, Victorian studies.

Thomas Hardy

Phillip Mallett has published widely on Hardy and has edited The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Return of the Native for Norton. He is the editor of Thomas Hardy in Context (CUP, 2012), and of the Thomas Hardy Journal and the Hardy Society Journal. He has written the introduction to Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford (OUP, 2010).