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Wessex Tales is an 1888 collection of tales written by English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, many of which are set before Hardy's birth in 1840.
In the various short stories, Hardy writes of the true nature of nineteenth-century marriage and its inherent restrictions, the use of grammar as a diluted form of thought, the disparities created by the role of class status in determining societal rank, the stance of women in society and the severity of even minor diseases causing the rapid onset of fatal symptoms prior to the introduction of sufficient medicinal practices. A focal point of all the short stories is that of social constraints acting to diminish one's contentment in life, necessitating unwanted marriages, repression of true emotion and succumbing to melancholia due to constriction within the confines of 19th-century perceived normalcy. [1]
Initially, in 1888, the collection contained five stories, all previously published in periodicals....
For the 1896 reprinting, Hardy added a sixth...
But in 1912, he reversed that decision, moving "An Imaginative Woman" to another collection, Life's Little Ironies (1894), while at the same time transferring two of the latter collection's stories...
...to Wessex Tales, [2] for a final total of seven stories.
Six of the short stories were adapted as television dramas, forming the BBC2 anthology series Wessex Tales:
The episodes were filmed entirely on location and on 16mm film, rather like the BBC adaptations of Ghost Stories for Christmas as opposed to the interiors being filmed inside a television studio on tape rather like Doctor Who or Poldark.
Richard Burton Matheson was an American author and screenwriter, primarily in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction genres.
Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wordsworth. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain such as those from his native South West England.
Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) is Thomas Hardy's fourth published novel and his first major literary success. It was published on 23 November 1874. It originally appeared anonymously as a monthly serial in Cornhill Magazine, where it gained a wide readership.
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, then included in the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840. The short story, a work of Gothic fiction, includes themes of madness, family, isolation, and metaphysical identities.
The Bloody Chamber is a collection of short fiction by English writer Angela Carter. It was first published in the United Kingdom in 1979 by Gollancz and won the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize. The stories are all based on fairytales or folk tales. However, Carter has stated:
My intention was not to do 'versions' or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, 'adult' fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories.
A Medicine for Melancholy (1959) is a collection of short stories by American writer Ray Bradbury. It was first published in the UK by Hart-Davis in 1959 as The Day It Rained Forever with a slightly different list of stories. All of the included stories were previously published.
An anthology series is a written series, radio, television, film, or video game series that presents a different story and a different set of characters in each different episode, season, segment, or short. These usually have a different cast in each episode, but several series in the past, such as Four Star Playhouse, employed a permanent troupe of character actors who would appear in a different drama each week. Some anthology series, such as Studio One, began on radio and then expanded to television.
The Assessment and Qualifications Alliance has produced Anthologies for GCSE English and English Literature studied in English schools. This follows on from AQA's predecessor organisations; Northern Examinations and Assessment Board (NEAB) and Southern Examining Group (SEG).
Egdon Heath is a fictitious area of Thomas Hardy's Wessex inhabited sparsely by the people who cut the furze (gorse) that grows there. The entire action of Hardy's novel The Return of the Native takes place on Egdon Heath, and it also features in The Mayor of Casterbridge and the short story The Withered Arm (1888). The area is rife with witchcraft and superstition.
Thomas Hardy's Wessex is the fictional literary landscape created by the English author Thomas Hardy as the setting for his major novels, located in the south and southwest of England. Hardy named the area "Wessex" after the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom that existed in this part of that country prior to the unification of England by Æthelstan. Although the places that appear in his novels actually exist, in many cases he gave the place a fictional name. For example, Hardy's home town of Dorchester is called Casterbridge in his books, notably in The Mayor of Casterbridge. In an 1895 preface to the 1874 novel Far from the Madding Crowd he described Wessex as "a merely realistic dream country".
Bibliography of science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction and nonfiction writer L. Sprague de Camp:
Long After Midnight is a short story collection by American writer Ray Bradbury. Several of the stories are original to this collection. Others originally appeared in the magazines Planet Stories, Collier's Weekly, Playboy, Esquire, Welcome Aboard, Other Worlds, Cavalier, Gallery, McCall's, Woman's Day, Harper's, Charm, Weird Tales, Eros, and Penthouse.
Life's Little Ironies is a collection of tales written by Thomas Hardy, originally published in 1894, and republished with a slightly different collection of stories, for the Uniform Edition in 1927/8.
A Group of Noble Dames is an 1891 collection of short stories written by English author Thomas Hardy. The stories are contained by a frame narrative in which ten members of a club each tell one story about a noble dame in the 17th or 18th century. Hardy included this work with his "Romances and fantasies".
Rhys Adrian Griffiths was a British playwright and screenwriter. He is best known for his radio plays, which are characterised by their emphasis upon dialogue rather than narrative.
Far from the Madding Crowd is a 1915 British silent drama film produced and directed by Laurence Trimble and starring Florence Turner, Henry Edwards and Malcolm Cherry. Trimble also adapted Thomas Hardy's 1874 novel for the screen. Far from the Madding Crowd is a lost film. The film was the first adaptation on screen of the novel.
"Barbara of the House of Grebe" is the second of ten short stories in Thomas Hardy's frame narrative A Group of Noble Dames. It is told by the old surgeon. The story was published in The Graphic in 1890 and in book form in 1891.
"The Three Strangers" is a short story by Thomas Hardy, first published in Longman's Magazine and Harper's Weekly in March 1883. It later it became the first of five stories in Hardy's 1888 short story collection Wessex Tales.
A Changed Man and Other Tales is a collection of twelve tales written by Thomas Hardy. The collection was originally published in book form in 1913, although all of the tales had been previously published in newspapers or magazines from 1881 to 1900. There are eleven short stories and a novella The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid. At the end of the book there is a map of the imaginary Wessex of Hardy's novels and poems. Six of the stories were published before 1891 and therefore lacked international copyright protection when the collection began to be sold in October 1913.
"The Fiddler of the Reels" is a short story by British writer Thomas Hardy. It was first published in Scribner's Magazine, volume 13 issue 4, April 1893. It was included in Life's Little Ironies, a collection of Thomas Hardy's short stories first published in 1894.