Thomas Hardy Research Articles

Prometheus in the Guise of Pessimism: The Tinder of Hope that Thomas Hardy Brought to his Audience at the End of the 19th Century

This paper is devoted to the substantive significance of Hardy's pessimism, mainly based on Thomas Hardy's poems and novels written in the late 19th century. Although pessimism has been recognized as an essential feature of Thomas Hardy's literary career as a novelist and poet, he refuses to admit to being a pessimist, instead enabling the use of pessimism as the first step in exploring reality and improving the soul and body of human beings. Through a dialectical reading of Hardy's works, this paper will further analyze the specific audience groups targeted by Hardy's pessimism and the extraordinary positive impact it brought to this group at the turn of the century and during the period of social change; compare it with the literature of other culture to deconstruct the contradictions of this pessimism and extract its unique value. In addition, this paper will introduce Hardy’s precise prediction of the future movement, which can demonstrate the unique value of literature compared to political and quasi-scientific discourse.

Heredity's Aesthetic Infrastructures

This essay traces a disjointed aesthetics of hereditary units in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895) and Chinese filmmaker Wang Xiaoshuai's So Long, My Son (2019) and argues that shared social and economic conditions of Victorian Britain and postsocialist China prompt similar ruptures of social realism's totalizing aspirations. The novel and the film are mutually concerned with tragedies of biopolitical management and doomed lineages, but at the same time they both employ an aesthetics of leapings and projections—also featured in Hardy's 1917 poem “Heredity”—that argues for the value of an individual life based on a radical divestment from personhood itself, in favor of the gene's mindless jumps through unmapped space and time.

Analysis of the Causes of Tess’s Tragedy from Multi-perspectives

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is one of the greatest rustic novelists as well as a great poet in English literary history. He is very good at looking at life in a tragic way and describing the human suffering in the tragic sentiment and a unique manner, so he is regarded by critics as " Shakespeare in English fiction ". His representative masterpiece, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, tells the tragic fate of Tess, a very pretty rural girl who is seduced by one man, then deserted by the other and finally propelled to murder for which she is hanged as a miserable consequence. Any tragedy is not isolated or accidental, but the result of many factors. Tess’s tragedy happens with a lot of causes. This paper aims to analyze the causes which lead to Tess’s tragedy from three perspectives: characters’ factors, social factors and writer's factors.

Explicit Intertextual Connections in Driscoll’s Her Perfect Family: A Reader-Centric Analysis

This study examines explicit intertextuality and its impact on the reader in Teresa Driscoll’s crime novel, Her Perfect Family, published in late 2021. Julia Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality stands as a significant milestone in postmodernist literature, positing that any new text is inevitably influenced or enriched by prior writings. British author Driscoll employs explicit intertextuality throughout the work, incorporating references to renowned English writers such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, D.H. Lawrence, Mary Shelley, and Lewis Carroll in various chapters. As a result, the reader perceives a connection between these authors and the chapters, contributing to the overall reading experience. It becomes evident that Driscoll, as a contemporary postmodernist novelist, draws from the themes and characters of these established literary figures to enhance the intricacies of her plot. By providing clues and insights relevant to the contemporary context, the author cleverly weaves explicit intertextual references into the narrative, engaging readers in a process akin to solving a puzzle, and creating connections. Moreover, Driscoll assumes the role of an instructor, posing critical questions about the aforementioned acclaimed authors, their works, and their characters. This approach makes the reader feel like a student, encouraging them to establish intertextual connections in Her Perfect Family and to understand the plot more easily.

The Rise and Fall of Michael Henchard in the novel “The Mayor of Casterbridge” by Thomas Hardy A story of a man of character

The Rise and Fall of Michael Henchard in the novel “The Mayor of Casterbridge” by Thomas Hardy A story of a man of character

Understanding Nature and Humanity: An Ecocritical Study of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the relationship between humans, Nature, and humanity and establish a harmonious coexistence, particularly in the wake of industrialization. This article aims to analyze Thomas Hardy's novel, The Return of the Native, from an ecocritical perspective and shed light on Thomas Hardy's ecological consciousness as reflected through the novel's various characters, settings, and plot. The primary objective of this study is to assess how the novel's characters respond to and engage with environmental concerns. Another aim is to trace the evolution of the concern for Nature and humanity, from the Victorian era to the Present, among writers, artists, and intellectuals. The third and final objective is to underscore the significance of reconnecting with Nature, as depicted in the novel. Methodology: This study has used the theory of ecocriticism, a relatively recent theoretical framework. It investigates the intersection of literature and the environment from an interdisciplinary viewpoint, exploring potential solutions for our contemporary environmental predicaments. It constitutes a qualitative research endeavor predominantly employing ecocritical theory to investigate the relationship between the novel's characters and the natural world. Findings: The study concludes that interconnection between humans, humanity, and the natural world is needed to avoid the consequences of environmental degradation, which is being tolerated by humankind. This paper proposes several recommendations to ameliorate contemporary environmental challenges that hold value for researchers, environmentalists, and all stakeholders committed to environmental conservation.

"Boyish as a Ganymede": Greek Love and the Erotic Experiment in Jude the Obscure

Abstract: This article demonstrates the importance of Jude the Obscure's Oxford setting to Thomas Hardy's project of writing a novel of maturation that refuses to conclude with successful reproduction. Linking the character of Sue Bridehead with Hardy's interest in writing about Greek love by Oxford graduates, I show how Jude's coupling with Sue incites intellectual exploration rather than the reducing development to the ends of reproductive marriage or professional achievement. To narrate the effect of Sue's tutelage, I show, Hardy derails the novel's teleological progression in favor of a pastoral mode made possible by spaces where the couple can safely practice non-marital sexuality. By way of conclusion, I position Jude at the start of a queer pastoral tradition in British fiction in which setting is formally significant because of its historical significance to the sustainability of sexually nonnormative lives.

Interpreting the Cause of Tess’ Tragedy: Dualism

Tess is widely recognized as the "best novel" of the 19th century by British realist novelist Thomas Hardy. The female protagonist Tess of the novel has also become an immortal artistic figure in the minds of readers.Tess in the novel was born into a poor peasant family, but has the blood of a declining aristocratic lineage . So she not only inherited the humble obedience, tenacious fighting spirit, and survival ability of her grandmother's family, but also had the self-esteem and arrogance from the declining aristocrats of her father's family, as well as the tendency of self destruction. This fact about bloodline is reflected in Tess, which is the duality of her personality. This article analyzes Tess' behavior and demeanor in the novel, more importantly her reactions and choice made to certain matters of significance, focusing on her contradictions in terms of the following aspects, that is, her self-esteem and inferiority complex, her pursuit of instinctual desires, and her construction of a fortress of religious ethics in her heart, her tenacious fighting spirits and weakness in mind . It not only interprets the stubborn and weak willed personality traits of life, but also explains the decisive role of personality in Tess' tragic fate.

Literary Travel and Cycling during fin de siècle England

For most of the literary historians, the time period between the 1880s and 1920s have generally been accepted as the climax years of the notion of literary travelling not only in Europe but also in England. This type of journeying fashion is seen in the literary works of many English writers such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Arthur Conan Doyle and many others. Literary travel can be considered as roaming of places of literary interest for pleasure where the traveller could experience and re-memory of birthplaces, homes, haunts and even graves of the prominent literary figures. Visiting places related with the particular writers or books coincides with bicycle condensed years of the last quarter of the nineteenth century (fin de siècle) in England. In addition to the above writers, Elizabeth Robins Pennell and Joseph Pennell are two different kind of travellers and their published account namely Our Sentimental Journey through France and Italy is worth scrutinizing. Both as American citizens, the Elizabeth Robins and Joseph Pennells decided to move to England in 1884, where they carried on their artistic and literary engagements for nearly thirty years, and the couple regularly had the chance to travel to Europe and brought their cultural baggage there on their tricycles. Joseph Pennell was born in Philadelphia, and he was an acclaimed lithographer of his time. After graduating from Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Joseph worked on the illustrations of travel articles and books for American publishers for a while. Through the mutual connection and overlapping of these two fin de siècle trends (literary travel and cycle travel) and the above-mentioned text of the Pennells’, this paper argues that the sentimental preconception of cycling complicates the experience of travelling for the above-mentioned couple as they tried to imitate Laurence Sterne, well-known writer of novels and travel accounts. For this respect, some supportive quotations will be given from the Pennells’ text in which they both lack to illustrate their sentimental mood in times and in other times, successfully show their joy enthusiasm in their pedalling with their tricycles. Thus, the foremost aim of this paper is to elaborate on Pennells’ text claiming their intertextual allusions on their former model Laurence Sterne.

Charging the Dead: The Necroeconomies of Burial Laws and the Legal Suspension of the Dead

While Victorian studies have traditionally examined anatomy laws and the dissection of executed criminals, this article discusses laws that required payment for execution and burial costs, and uncovers actual cases in which families refused payment and as a result the state refused to release the corpse. Capital punishment looms over novels such as Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, and Great Expectations, and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Yet, conspicuously absent from these novels are the necropolitics and economics surrounding the dead body of the executed, which saw more legal protections in the nineteenth century. The aim is to not only excavate laws rarely discussed in critical literature, but to interrogate the astonishing lengths the common law and ecclesiastical court systems were taking in order to manage bodies (through fees, burial prescriptives, customary laws, and so on). Execution and burial fees were designed to financially exploit the grieving poor. Therefore, what often resulted was a suspension of burial – a delay caused by necroeconomies built into these grim financial systems. The article thus brings together ecclesiastical court cases to underscore the tension between customary burial fees, Poor Laws, and their critique in fiction.

Voicing the Silence of the Stigmatised: Communication with the Landscape in Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy and Gerard Manley Hopkins

Most human beings continue to erroneously claim speech and communication as exclusive attributes of the supposed superior human race, presumably due to humanity’s adherence to the dominant anthropocentric teachings of the Great Chain of Being. The voices or articulations of other living beings such as animals, birds, insects and the flora (trees and grass), here considered as the stigmatised are ignored or simply rendered inexistent by humans. This paper investigates he communicative abilities of landscape beings as delineated in selected poems of Thomas Hardy and Gerard Manley Hopkins. It adopts the ecocritical views of Cheryll Glotfelty, Christopher Manes and Michael J. McDowell to argue that the notion speech and communication is not limited to humans. The paper stresses that non-human beings are endowed with the ability to communicate and that it is possible for humans to learn the language of other beings for mutual communication. It further stresses that an understanding of the speech and communication potentials of the non-human neighbours of humankind would trigger a reconsideration of the ‘inferior’ position human beings have ascribed to other creatures. The paper emphasises that keen observation of the behaviour, facial expressions and postures of non-humans would facilitate the understanding of their language and communication. It equally sees Manes’ and McDowell’s ecocritical discourses as suitable perspectives to be adopt in order to fill the existing communication gap between humans and other landscape beings. The paper concludes that mutual communication between landscape beings would curb the indifference, negligence and, above all, the cruelty the supposed stigmatised ‘inferior’ non-human beings endure from human beings.

Thomas Hardy’s Racialization of English Natives in The Return of the Native

Thomas Hardy’s Racialization of English Natives in The Return of the Native

Investigating the Effect of Stylistic Analysis on EFL Students’ Comprehension of some of Thomas Hardy’s Poems

This study investigates the role of the stylistic analysis in increasing the comprehension of the EFL students of the poetic texts.It focuses on presenting some linguistic categories of three poems of Thomas Hardy. These poems are preceded by a a test and followed by the same test.Then, it compares and measures the answers of the subjects to judge whether there is any improvement in their interpretation of the selected poems. It also sheds light on the distinctive features of Hardy's poetic language. Finally, the study infers that stylistic analysis has an undeniable pedagogical importance for students who study English as a foreign language.

Toward a Decolonial Queer Humanism: Thomas Hardy's The Well-Beloved and André Aciman's Call Me by Your Name

Abstract: This essay situates queer negativity within the modernist tradition. In The Well-Beloved (1897), Thomas Hardy satirizes the then-popular notion of racial memory for its racist, colonialist implications, inaugurating the modernist critique of romantic love as complicit with the self-delusions of the liberal-humanist subject. Despite the view shared by modernists and queer negativists that this alienation is universal and unavoidable, Hardy hints at how an aestheticized version racial memory can enable collective agency beyond Western individualism. André Aciman expresses this decolonial version of racial memory in Call Me by Your Name (2007), moving beyond the limitations of modernist queer negativity in his portrayal of desire between Jewish men.

The Tess of the D Urbervilles' by Thomas Hardy Women Oppression on Heroine "Tess"

This paper is critical analysis of Thomas Hardy novel Tess of the D Ubervilles . and focus on women character Tess, Hardy novel sets in Victorian England, a time when the country was very prosperous, moreover society was dominated by a rigid social hierarchy. Victorian women was treated as second class women ,citizen and marginalized, their identities that roles in the family. such as as wife , a mother , daughter, and widow, Hardy character examined in this regard to how the functions according to these roles. The women view according to hardy novels can be placed in three groups. The first groups should include are full length Tess, Sue , Eustacia, Bathsheba, and Elizabeth. Second groups may cover Elfreid , Ethelberta, Grace, Vivette and Anne. The Third group is also a mixed on this group Paula ,Marty Arabella, Tamsie, Lucetta, Picotte, Tabitha, Matilda, FannyRobin Charlotte Mrs YEobright, Mrs.Swancourt, Melburry, Susanhenchard and few others oppression

Two centuries of the English novel: A co-authored monograph. In celebration of Prof. B. M. Proskurnin’s 70th anniversary

In focus of this review is a co-authored monograph that examines novels by 19th to 21st c. English authors in order to trace the key evolutionary changes of this world literature’s most popular genre. In his introduction entitled ‘A well-made English novel’ [‘Khorosho sdelanniy angliyskiy roman’], Prof. B. Proskurnin shares several constructive ideas. He mentions that, at the very outset, the single requirement for the contributors was that they should choose the authors who interest them the most and inspire a study of their oeuvre through the prism of preserving the national genre memory and as an innovator of the genre. The volume explores unique artistic characteristics of the selected works which represent milestones in the history of the novel and sheds light on the functioning of the English novelistic tradition, nurtured by the creativity and innovative approach of writers like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Antony Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, David Herbert Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch, Ian McEwan, and Hilary Mantel.

Conception of Space in Two Late Nineteenth-Century Writers, Thomas Hardy and Josef Karel Šlejhar

The famous English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy and the little-known Czech short story writer Josef K. Šlejhar share a similar position in literary history, both being frequently, and rather inaccurately, discussed in the context of European naturalism. Though being partly influenced by the same ideas as the French naturalists, they both developed an individual mode of representation, especially in the way they structure the space of their fiction. The present paper attempts to analyse their approach and to demonstrate the fundamental difference of their conceptions. The prevailing form of space in Hardy is structured landscape where the nodal points are loci characterized by specific semantic density determining the issues the major characters are confronted with. Contrary to this, Šlejhar’s conception tends to present space as an exteriorizing projection of his characters’ situation, very often representing a moral dilemma of an individual or a community; due to this his space is less structured but more intense, deriving its meaning from the character, while in Hardy the process is reverse. The principal focus of the paper is thus on the semantics of the interaction between character and its environment or circumambient space.

Literary style in the novel and on the screen: The intersemiotic translation of Far from the Madding Crowd

Since Roman Jakobson’s classification of intersemiotic translation as a sub-category of translation, the term has paved the way for many studies on the close relationship between literature and cinema. Among different semiotic systems, the adaptation of literary works to the cinema occupies a central position in intersemiotic translation. In this respect, the present study approaches Far from the Madding Crowd directed by Thomas Vinterberg in 2015 as an intersemiotic translation of Thomas Hardy’s novel under the same title. It aims to evaluate how Hardy’s two major stylistic markers in the novel, i.e. sentence structure and imagery, are brought to the film by Vinterberg. To this end, the notions of transfer and intersemiotic transposition were used to identify related stylistic components in the novel and to compare them with their visual representations in the film. Thus, Vinterberg’s specific choices in reflecting Hardy’s literary style were analyzed. The findings of the present study suggest that Vinterberg paid attention to Hardy’s literary style and attempted to transfer it to the film to a large extent, as he reflected the writer’s sentence structure and imagery through various visual and auditory tools. However, it can be also observed that possibly due to the limited duration of the film, Vinterberg sometimes had to avoid transferring Hardy’s elaborate narration in some scenes.

The Role of Henchard’s Character in Loss and Profit of His Business in the Novel the Mayor of Casterbridge

To identify and explore the role of Michael Henchard’s character in loss and profit of his business in Thomas Hardy’s novel The Mayor of Casterbrdige, a qualitative research method is used in this study. The novel portrays the protagonist’s journey from being a poor helpless hay trusser to a successful mayor and businessman of the town who finally ends up meeting a miserably tragic downfall at the end of the plot. The article discusses whether Henchard was driven by fate to the misery or was that his own decision making ability (character) that was flawed. The text of the novel is used as primary source of data collection. Many other research articles, journals and books served as secondary sources for data collection. After a diligent analysis of the textual data the researcher reaches to the conclusion that the novel is a great presentation of indeterminism. Through the protagonist’s character Hardy has depicted the philosophy of ‘Character is Fate’ in a very artistic and realistic manner. As per findings of the study it is strongly recommended that other scholars may work on the role of fate in Hardy’s characters, the impacts of genetics on his characters’ lives and his profound philosophy of pessimism and nihilism are yet to be discovered areas where further research could easily be carried out.

The Rhetoric History of Culture and Nature: The Return of the Native

The effects of industrialization during the Victorian era on the environment in Britain were huge, leading to numerous criticisms. Despite this, there has been limited research done with an ecocritical approach to the Victorians’ interactions with the environment. Further, only a handful of scholars have analyzed Victorian novelists’ representations of their time’s ecology. This article discusses the relationship between man and nature as represented in Thomas Hardy’s novel “The Return of the Native”. Analyzing this work helps us understand Victorian ecological and social criticism of the linkage between man and environment, often considered at the time to be psychologically and biologically strange and intriguing. Analyzing the novel’s different characters and their qualities and interactions with the environment helps us to understand the link between man and his environment today. This article explains how and why Hardy portrays the place of man in the world using the setting of Egdon Heath. Keywords: Culture, Land, Ecocritism, Nature, Writing, Ecosystem, Environmental Rhetoric.