Bleak Prospects: Wasteland and National Identity in Thomas Hardy's <i>Return of the Native</i>

Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878) has been praised for its careful attention to relationship between humans and their environment. Hardy traces intricate local community, ecosystem, economy, national political structures with surprising fluidity. This essay argues that his detail provides an important account function wasteland in English historical development. In doing so, it also establishes category waste as a functional element character networks narrative fiction. While emerges from respect rural laborer nostalgia precapitalist modes social economic life, valorization parsimony imagination nonetheless subtend form nationalism coextensive production British imperial ideology.