Reading Groups

Hardy in a Time of Change with Amy Wong

4 Sessions Mondays, 6:00 pm EDT - 7:30 pm EDT April 21 to June 2, 2025

Online via Zoom

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The ‘With Books’ option includes the titles required for this group at an additional 10% discount from our Bookstore.

Meeting Dates:
4/21, 5/5, 5/19, 6/2
Online via Zoom

Thomas Hardy is often regarded as the most pessimistic of the major Victorian novelists. While working within some of the conventions of nineteenth-century British realism such as the marriage plot and bildungsroman, unlike contemporaries such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot, Hardy is known not only for his unhappy endings but also for brutally killing off his title characters. In this group, we will read two of Hardy’s most famous (and famously bleak) novels, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure.

Our discussions will explore Hardy’s pessimism within the contexts of his identification as a regional writer concerned with the impacts of industrialization, urbanization, and land enclosure on rural village life; his interest in emergent evolutionary sciences; and his meticulous attention to how art might register the intimate devastations wrought by broad, historical changes at the scale of the individual life. Participants are welcome to draw connections to some of the challenges we face in today’s rapidly changing social, economic, and technological landscape, and to explore why Hardy matters now.

What to read in advance of the first meeting: Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Phases 1-4 (or Chapters 1-34)

What to expect from this reading group: Participants should expect the course to be primarily discussion based with instructor guidance on historical and literary contexts, and suggested topics for conversation.

Reading List:

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

Capacity: 20

Please note: All virtual classes are recorded. Please click here for information about our recording policy.

Led by

Amy R. Wong

Amy R. Wong

Amy R. Wong is a scholar, literary critic, and associate professor of English at Dominican University of California. Her research and writing has focused on Victorian literature, the British empire, and postcolonial theory, as well as contemporary Asian and Asian Anglophone literatures and film, and psychoanalytic approaches to literature. Her first book, Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk, was published with Stanford University Press in 2023. She is currently at work on a new project comparing the realist novels of Dickens and Hardy with “Sixth Generation” Chinese film. She holds a B.A. in History and Literature from Harvard College and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles.

About this series

Reading Groups

Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.

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