Thomas Hardy, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode

1. Introduction: Thomas Hardy and the Melodramatic Imagination
Richard Nemesvari

Part 1. Melodramas of Masculinity—Desperate Remedies and ;The Mayor of Casterbridge

2. “‘I love you better than any man can’”: Sensation Fiction, Class, and Gender Role Anxiety in Desperate Remedies

Richard Nemesvari

3. “‘No man ever loved another as I did thee’”: Melodrama, Masculinity, and the Moral Occult (I) in The Mayor of Casterbridge

Richard Nemesvari

Part II. Sensational Bodies, Melodramatic Spectacles—Far from the Madding Crowd and A Laodicean

4. “‘Kiss me too, Frank … You will Frank kiss me too!’” Sensationalism, Surveillance, and Gazing at the Body in Far from the Madding Crowd

Richard Nemesvari

5. “‘A mixed young lady, rather’”: Melodrama, Technology, and Dis/Embodied Sensation in A Laodicean

Richard Nemesvari

Part III. Melodramas of Modernity and Class Status—The Hand of Ethelberta and Jude the Obscure

6. “‘Lady—not a penny less than lady’”: Satire, Melodrama, and the Sensational Fiction of Class Status in The Hand of Ethelberta

Richard Nemesvari

7. “‘Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery?’”: Sensationalist Tragedy, Melodramatic Modernity, and the Moral Occult (II) in Jude the Obscure

Richard Nemesvari

Keywords: Literature, Fiction, British and Irish Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Social Sciences, general