THE THOMAS HARDY ASSOCIATION
LINKS
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DIRECTOR: ROBERT SCHWEIK
© 1999-2004
OXFORD TEXT ARCHIVE
DESCRIPTION:
Address: http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/
Contact: Alan Morrison (info@ota.ahds.ac.uk)
Date: 07/01/04
The Oxford Text Archive, Oxford University Computing Services, 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN, UK, has as its stated objective to provide access to well-documented electronic texts produced to high standards. As part of its services, it maintains an archive of e-texts by many other authors, some, but not all, directly available on the WWW. An author search for "Hardy, Thomas" yields nine Hardy e-texts derived from various sources and in various formats:
For each the following information is provided:
COMMENT:
In spite of its laudable goal, the quality and scholarly usefulness of these texts varies greatly. In the case of the Hardy texts, the likely reliability of the editing work can differ markedly from text to text. The Jude the Obscure, for example, is clearly identified as the 1912 Wessex Edition compiled by the scholar/editor Patricia Ingham, and this provenience is warrant of a carefully prepared text, though the coding format used is stated to be unknown. The A Pair of Blue Eyes, on the other hand, is based on a dubious Project Gutenberg ASCII text, whose only preface, dated March, 1899, may signify that it was derived from an American edition of that date; this unidentified edition was then converted to SGML by Sara Triggs of the OED North American Reading Program, and neither the doubtful source of that text, nor the reputation of the compiler in Hardy scholarship, warrant confidence. A listing of the Tess of the d'Urbervilles text as Tess of the D"Urbervilles [sic] raises similar uncertainties. See our GENERAL CAUTION about such texts.