SOURCE: Kerridge, Richard. “Ecological Hardy.” In Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, edited by Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace, pp. 126‐41. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001.

In the following essay, Kerridge maintains that if Thomas Hardy were seen as an important author in the canon of environmental literature, ecocriticism would become more concerned with individuals and society and less with withdrawing into the wilderness.

Thomas Hardy is an obvious candidate for the ecocritical canon. The best known of English rural novelists, he is intensely responsive to the natural world and human relations with that world. Some of the most exciting passages of English nature writing are in his novels, integrated with a complexity of cultural, political, economic, and emotional life. I suggest that the ecocritical canonization of Hardy would help to produce an ecocriticism (and a nature writing) less preoccupied with deep withdrawal from society. Hardy...