Abstract
The very brilliance of J. Hillis Miller’s Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire requires that students of the novel examine the assumptions on which it is based. Because Miller’s purpose is to discover a ‘single design’, he assumes that ‘works composed over a career spanning almost sixty years can now be thought of as existing simultaneously within a single totality’ (Thomas Hardy, p. ix).1 But, we must ask, does a novel have the same relationship to a writer’s corpus as an individual chapter does to a novel? I believe each novel has its own unique form which generates values and effects that provide the crucial context for an individual passage or incident.
Published Version
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