Mischaracterizing the Environment: Hardy, Darwin, and the Art of Ecological Storytelling

Abstract

This article reads Hardy's representation of Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native (1878) against the ecology and environmental history of English heathland to challenge a growing consensus that sees Hardy as an ecological thinker. Hardy's writings fall short of ecological understanding, I argue, because his vision of humans entangled with an animated but deeply inhuman landscape creates affective and scalar tensions that falsely cast interspecies interdependence as ominous and alienating.