Thomas Hardy Thomas Hardy.. Born of humble parents at Upper Bockhampton, near Dorchester. When left...

Thomas HardyThomas Hardy.

• Born of humble parents at Upper Bockhampton, near Dorchester.

• When left school, was apprenticed to a local architect and church restorer.

1. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy

Only Connect ... New Directions

• 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

1. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Thomas Hardy


Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)

Far From the Madding Crowd (1874)

The Return of the Native (1878)

The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)

2. Hardy’s works

The Hardy cottage in Higher Bockhampton, Dorchester

Thomas Hardy


2. Hardy’s works

The Woodlanders (1887)

Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)

Jude the Obscure (1895)

Wessex Poems (1928)

Thomas Hardy

The Hardy cottage in Higher Bockhampton, Dorchester


• 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».

3 .Features of Hardy’s novels

Thomas Hardy

A contemporary edition of The Return of the Native.


• 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.

3 .Features of Hardy’s novels

Thomas Hardy

A contemporary edition of Far from the Madding Crowd.


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».

Thomas Hardy

Hardy and his dog.


• Detailed, controlled language, rich in symbolism.

• Use of metaphor, simile, personification.

• Important role of the language of sense impressions.

4 .Hardy’s style

Thomas Hardy

Hardy and his dog.


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.

5 .Hardy’s Wessex

Thomas Hardy

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.

6 .Why Wessex?

Thomas Hardy

The Wessex of the Novels & Poems in Hardy’s own drawing.


• 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.

7 .Hardy’s Themes

Thomas Hardy

A contemporary edition of Tess of the D’Ubervilles.


7 .Hardy’s Themes

Thomas Hardy

• 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.


Thomas Hardy Thomas Hardy.. Born of humble parents at Upper Bockhampton, near Dorchester. When left...

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