Thomas Hardy

Abstract

Thomas Hardy was born in Lower Bockhampton, Dorset, in 1840 and, with brief interruptions, continued to live in and around Dorchester until his death in 1928. His work was intimately linked to the “half-real, half-dream country” of Wessex, a fictionalized version of England’s rural South West. Hardy trained and practiced as an architect but went on to publish fourteen novels, over forty short stories, roughly a thousand poems, several essays, an epic verse drama about the Napoleonic War, and a shorter verse play with Arthurian themes. Given the volume and diversity of this output, and the fact that his writing career spanned from the mid-Victorian years to the heyday of literary Modernism, Hardy’s work resists easy categorization. It is, moreover, marked by profound tensions: between a rural upbringing, a modern education, and an international literary career; between a commitment to preserving local tradition, dialect, and folklore and an ongoing, thorough engagement with contemporary cultural debate; and between the commercial profitability of fiction and the desire to be remembered as a poet. Correspondingly, critical responses to Hardy’s work, especially from the 1980s onward, have been richly diverse and shaped by a broad range of critical concerns and methodologies, including—but not limited to—Marxism, feminism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, New Historicism, ecocriticism, animal studies, and postcolonial theory. During the 19th century, several of Hardy’s novels became objects of critical controversy, given his frank treatment of sexual matters, his critique of marriage, and his religious skepticism. Numerous scholars have explored the creative repercussions of Hardy’s fraught negotiations with literary and social conventions. In the first half of the 20th century, though, critical discussions paid particular attention to Hardy’s philosophy, his tragic outlook, and his humanist ethics, while focusing primarily on the poetry and so-called major novels. More recent studies have provided a more nuanced picture of Hardy’s oeuvre, by accounting for works, formal features, and thematic elements that disrupt the image of a liberal-humanist chronicler of rural life. Since the 1970s, Hardy’s writings have provided a fertile ground Hardy saw the beginning of feminist, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, Marxist, and New Historicist revaluations. Recent criticism has gained particular impetus from a growing awareness that, though firmly associated with rural “Wessex” life, Hardy’s work is shaped by an ongoing engagement with nationwide and international cultural debates, political issues, technological developments, scientific discoveries, and aesthetic trends.