Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy.
Thomas Hardy
1. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
• Born of humble parents at Upper
Bockhampton, near Dorchester.
• When left school, was apprenticed
to a local architect and church
restorer.
Thomas Hardy
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Thomas Hardy
1. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
• Read the works of Comte, Mill,
Darwin, which helped shape his
thought.
• The philosophy of his works echoes
Schopenhauer’s The World as Will
and Idea, with the Immanent Will
which makes notions of free will
illusory.
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Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy
2. Hardy’s works
Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)
Far From the Madding Crowd (1874)
The Return of the Native (1878)
The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
The Hardy cottage in Higher Bockhampton, Dorchester
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Thomas Hardy
2. Hardy’s works
The Woodlanders (1887)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)
Jude the Obscure (1895)
Wessex Poems (1928)
The Hardy cottage in Higher Bockhampton, Dorchester
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Thomas Hardy
3. Features of Hardy’s novels
•
Interest in the life of the peasants in an age
of decline and decay of peasantry.
•
Nostalgia for the pastoral and patriarchal
way of life.
•
Deterministic view, deprived of the
consolation of Divine order.
•
Man’s life controlled by hostile, cruel fate,
«insensible chance».
A contemporary edition of The Return of the
Native.
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Thomas Hardy
3. Features of Hardy’s novels
• Superb sense of place:
description of ruins of churches,
towers, walls, but also important
monuments like Stonehenge.
• Love of detail to strengthen the
final effect  a naturalistic
approach.
A contemporary edition of Far from the Madding
Crowd.
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Thomas Hardy
4. Hardy’s style
• Use of colour strongly linked to
emotion and experience,
especially connected with
natural landscape.
• Victorian omniscient narrator.
• Use of cinematic techniques
similar to the «camera eye»
and the «zoom».
Hardy and his dog.
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Thomas Hardy
4. Hardy’s style
• Detailed, controlled language,
rich in symbolism.
• Use of metaphor, simile,
personification.
• Important role of the language of
sense impressions.
Hardy and his dog.
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Thomas Hardy
5. Hardy’s Wessex
The Wessex of the Novels & Poems in Hardy’s own drawing.
In Hardy’s major novels there is the progressive mapping of a semi-fictional
region, the south-west corner of England and his native county of Dorset.
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Thomas Hardy
6. Why Wessex?
The Wessex of the Novels & Poems in Hardy’s own drawing.
By Wessex Hardy meant the old Saxon kingdom of Alfred the Great. Wessex
transcends topographical limits combining the imaginative experience of
the individual with a sense of man’s place in the universe.
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Thomas Hardy
7. Hardy’s Themes
• The difficulty of being alive.
• Nature  Indifferent to man’s
destiny, sets the pattern of growth
and decay; implies regeneration,
expressed through the cycle of
seasons.
A contemporary edition of Tess of the D’Ubervilles.
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Thomas Hardy
7. Hardy’s Themes
• Criticism of the most
conventional, moralistic,
hypocritical aspects of Victorian
society.
• Polemic attitude to religion:
Christianity is no longer capable of
fulfilling the needs of modern man.
A contemporary edition of Tess of the D’Ubervilles.
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