1. Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy.

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Thomas Hardy
1. Thomas Hardy ( )
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 ( )
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.
Thomas Hardy
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4. 2. Hardy’s works Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)
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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5. 2. Hardy’s works The Woodlanders (1887)
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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6. 3. Features of Hardy’s novels
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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7. 3. Features of Hardy’s novels
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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10. 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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11. 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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