Thomas Hardy

1. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

2. Hardy • English poet and author of the naturalism movement • Author of Mayor of Casterbridge,Tess of D’uberville, and Jude The Obscure • Eldest sibling of four • Father was a builder and stonemason

3. Influence in Writing • Hardy's fictional Wessex is based upon the environs where he grew up and loved so much and where he lived and worked for a large part of his life. • He always had a dream to be a poet and was well connected emotionally to his environment through interaction and observation.

4. Famous Works • Tess of D’Uberville- A brilliant tale of seduction, love, betrayal, and murder, Tess of the d'Ubervilles yields to narrative convention by punishing Tess's sin, but boldly exposes this standard denouement of unforgiving morality as cruelly unjust. • Jude the Obsure- It tells the tragic story of Jude Fawley, a kid from the country whose aspirations to university scholarship are thwarted; his socially unacceptable love affair is also a disaster. **Seen as his most important work.

5. Criticism • Tess and Jude received many criticisms upon publication, for in examinations of the fallen woman, sin, the class system, and the vagaries of religion and marriage,--".... a marriage should be dissolvable as soon as it becomes a cruelty to either of the parties--being then essentially and morally no marriage...." they shocked Hardy's Victorian readers' sensibilities.

6. Criticism • His tragic characters lives' earned the labels "immoral" and "obscene". • Hardy muses in his Preface to the 1912 edition of Jude about a bishop who burnt a copy of his book "probably in his despair at not being able to burn me.“ • The controversy drew much attention to the novels as well, and they were soon being read in Europe and North America. • Never wrote another book, turned to plays and poetry instead.

7. Victorian Era • “Repressed” and “prudish” • time of prosperity, broad imperial expansion, and great political reform • many artistic styles, literary schools, as well as, social, political and religious movements flourished • Stretches through the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901)

8. Naturalism • Naturalism can be deduced as something pertaining to reality. • This is definitely so because naturalism is actually a development in literature that is meant to reproduce the everyday realities of life. • This is in opposition to past movements such the Surrealism or Romanticism, wherein idealism and symbolism are the lords of creation. • Literary naturalism portrays the nature of human beings through detached and objective study based on scientific principles.

9. Narturalism • Focus on how humans live their daily lives, not only through the influences of environment and heredity, but also with the guidance of their passions and instincts. • Mainly focuses on characters from the lower classes or the middle classes and the fiction that usually evolves around the common and seemingly boring existence of somebody with whom most people can relate to.

10. Naturalism • Characters usually have acts of passion or violence. • The usual attempts of the main characters of these novels when it comes to exercising their freedom, which are hampered usually by forces that they could not control, are also perceived as a common occurrence in the daily lives of everyday people.

11. His Work • His novels deals with issues concerning women in this time period and their hardships. The book also explores ideas such as fatalism and determinism. • Fatalism- is the view that we are powerless to do anything other than what we actually do. • Determinism-human actions affect the future, although that future is predetermined. • The idea of a blind, arbitrary fate is a central theme in Hardy's fiction. Although this fate is blind, it is not neutral but almost always cruel. It is a force that brings suffering and feels no pity or remorse.