Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T14:07:47.827Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Thomas Hardy's Groundwork

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Daniel Wright
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Thomas Hardy strategically exposes what he calls the “groundwork” of his fictional worlds in scenes depicting blizzards or total darkness that scrub away all points of orientation. When Hardy reveals the empty field—”forms without features”—within which the details of the novel take shape, he aims to investigate the ontological, rather than epistemological or aesthetic, questions raised by novelistic realism. By tracing Hardy's groundwork through several novels, primarily Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), the essay shows that Hardy's vexed relation to the realist tradition arises out of the metaphysical paradoxes endemic to novelistic mimesis.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 134 , Issue 5 , October 2019 , pp. 1028 - 1041
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke UP, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aristotle, . Physics. The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume 1: The Revised Oxford Translation, edited by Barnes, Jonathan, Princeton UP, 1984, pp. 315–446.Google Scholar
Auyoung, Elaine. “The Sense of Something More in Art and Experience”. Style, vol. 44, no. 4, Winter 2010, pp. 547–65.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977-78). translated by Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier, edited by Clerc, Thomas and Marty, Eric, Columbia UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Bartlett, Jami. Object Lessons: The Novel as a Theory of Reference. U of Chicago P, 2016.Google Scholar
Berger, Sheila. Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures: Framing, Disruption, Process. New York UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Bullen, J.B. The Expressive Eye: Fiction and Perception in the Work of Thomas Hardy. Oxford UP, 1986.Google Scholar
Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay. Princeton UP, 1986.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Casagrande, Peter. Unity in Hardy's Novels: “Repetitive Symmetries.” Macmillan, 1982.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Christoff, Alicia. “Alone with Tess”. Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 48, no. 1, Spring 2015, pp. 18–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, William A. Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses. U of Minnesota P, 2008.Google Scholar
Cohn, Elisha. Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel. Oxford UP, 2015.Google Scholar
Freedgood, Elaine, and Schmitt, Cannon. “Denotatively, Technically, Literally”. Representations, vol. 125, no. 1, Winter 2014, pp. 1–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, Lindsay Gail. “Thomas Hardy's Lit Interiors”. Thomas Hardy Journal, vol. 30, no. 3, Autumn 2014, pp. 161–84.Google Scholar
Hardy, Thomas. Far from the Madding Crowd. Edited by Falck-Yi, Suzanne B. and Shires, Linda M., Oxford UP, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. Edited by Ingham, Patricia, Oxford UP, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hardy, Thomas. The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy. Edited by Millgate, Michael, Macmillan, 1984.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hardy, Thomas. The Return of the Native. Edited by Gatrell, Simon, Oxford UP, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hardy, Thomas. “The Science of Fiction”. Thomas Hardy: Selected Poetry and Non-fictional Prose, edited by Widdowson, Peter, Palgrave Macmillan, 1996, pp. 261–64.Google Scholar
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Edited by Grindle, Juliet and Gatrell, Simon, Oxford UP, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hardy, Thomas. Under the Greenwood Tree. Edited by Gatrell, Simon, Oxford UP, 1985.Google Scholar
Henchman, Anna. The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature. Oxford UP, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Irwin, Michael. Reading Hardy's Landscapes. St. Martin's, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobus, Mary. “Tree and Machine: The Woodlanders”. Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy, edited by Kramer, Dale, Palgrave Macmillan, 1979, pp. 116–34.Google Scholar
Jaffe, Audrey. The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real: Conventions and Ideology. Oxford UP, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kolb, Margaret. “Plot Circles: Hardy's Drunkards and Their Walks”. Victorian Studies, vol. 56, no. 4, Summer 2014, pp. 595–623.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kornbluh, Anna. “Obscure Forms: The Letter, the Law, and the Line in Hardy's Social Geometry”. Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 48, no.1, May 2015, pp. 1–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kornbluh, Anna. “The Realist Blueprint”. The Henry James Review, vol. 36, no. 3, Fall 2015, pp. 199–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. translated by Bostock, Anna, MIT Press, 1971.Google Scholar
Miller, J. Hillis. Communities in Fiction. Fordham UP, 2015.Google Scholar
Miller, J. Hillis. Topographies. Stanford UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Morgan, Benjamin. “Scale in Tess in Scale”. Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 52, no. 1, May 2019, pp. 44–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moten, Fred. “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)”. South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 112, no. 4, Fall 2013, pp. 737–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rauschenberg, Robert. White Painting [three panel]. 1951, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.Google Scholar
Rosenberg, Aaron. “‘Infinitesimal Lives’: Thomas Hardy's Scale Effects”. Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, edited by Hensley, Nathan K. and Steer, Philip, Fordham UP, 2019, pp. 182–202.Google Scholar
Scarry, Elaine. Dreaming by the Book. Princeton UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Scarry, Elaine. “Participial Acts: Working: Work and the Body in Hardy and Other Nineteenth-Century Novelists”. Resisting Representation, Oxford UP, 1994, pp. 49–90.Google Scholar
Shires, Linda M.“The Radical Aesthetic of Tess of the d'Urbervilles”. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, edited by Kramer, Dale, Cambridge UP, 1999, pp. 145–63.Google Scholar
Simplicius, . On Aristotle Physics 6. Translated by Konstan, David, edited by Sorabji, Richard, Bloomsbury, 1989.Google Scholar
Steinberg, Leo. Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art. OxfordUP, 1972.Google Scholar
Ward, Megan. “The Woodlanders and the Cultivation of Realism”. SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, vol. 51, no. 4, Autumn 2011, pp. 865–82.Google Scholar