![]() ![]() By reading The Woodlanders alongside Cavell, I suggest that Hardy develops an ecological mode of relation dependent neither on knowledge of nor on continuity with nonhuman worlds but, rather, on a negotiation of the epistemological and ontological limits inhering between, in this instance, humans and trees. Its senselessness, I contend, indexes a broader discomfort with, and rejection of, what Stanley Cavell would call relations of knowing as the foundation of ecology. ![]() Hardy posits an episode that resists narrative accommodation: simply, it does not make sense. I argue that this subplot is of central importance to The Woodlanders (1887) and to Hardy’s ecological thinking more generally. This essay attends to one of the stranger episodes in Thomas Hardy’s fiction: the inexplicably linked deaths of John South and the elm tree outside his house. ![]() Maxwell Sater, “Hardy's Trees: Ecology and the Question of Knowledge in The Woodlanders” (pp. ![]()
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