Thomas Hardy wrote during a time of extraordinary growth in British education when the purposes of learning were being passionately questioned. This thesis situates Hardy’s writing both within and beyond these debates, showing how his writing avows a Victorian fascination with education while contesting its often rigid actualization in nineteenth-century society. This project places new emphasis on the range of educationalists that Hardy counted as friends. These included the dialect poet and early-Victorian schoolmaster, William Barnes; the influential architect of the 1870s board schools, Thomas Roger Smith; and the leader of late-century reforms to female teacher training colleges, Joshua Fitch. Caught between life in rural surroundings and systemized forms of education, Hardy's characters frequently endure dislocation from community and estrangement from natural environments as penalties of their intellectual development. Much previous scholarship has for this reason claimed education as a source of despair in Hardy’s writing. However, this thesis reveals the people and experiences which rigid institutions exclude, and foregrounds Hardy’s depiction of the natural environment as an alternative source of learning. Exploring Hardy's representations of education as both reflective of contemporary change and suggestive of new possibilities, chapters focus on aspects of education most resonant with Hardy's own life and central to his fiction, including the professionalization and training of schoolmistresses, the working-class movement for liberal education, educational architecture, and rural forms of education. By exploring connections between fiction and social and political concerns, the thesis demonstrates how the idea of education relates to some key characteristics of Hardy's writing, for example the observant onlooker and the native returned.

University of Macau / Faculty of Science and Technology / Department of Mathematics

This study was prompted by the belief that the importance of the regionalism in Thomas Hardy's novels has been overlooked by recent critics and that no comprehensive study of the effect of regionalism on his novels has been made. A main purpose of this thesis is to examine Hardy's method of adapting his region to his universal themes. The second chapter illustrates Hardy's connection with Wessex and the influence of the region upon Hardy's conception of the novel, his style, his range as a writer, his temperament, and his philosophy. The third chapter considers his themes, and, concluding that they are mainly universal in nature, studies his method of giving universality to his setting and characters. It also contains an examination of Hardy's only regional theme - the agricultural theme. The fourth chapter considers the relationship between universal causes and regional causes in the plots of the Wessex novels and concludes that Hardy is a true regional writer, not only because his characters depend for their living upon the region, but also because many of his plots turn around regional characteristics. A study of the three classes of characters - the outsiders, the major regional characters, and the rustics - in relation to the region and the universe completes this consideration of Hardy's use of his region in his novels. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Hardy's novels draw on his knowledge of rural life in the nineteenth century; the effects of the agricultural depression form part of his material. Similarly, Darwinian thought affects his response to man and nature. Neither the subject-matter nor the philosophy, however, accounts for Hardy's changing attitude to his heroes and heroines who face consistently similar predicaments. This thesis accounts for such change in terms of Hardy's recognition that the old-world values of community life were inadequate for modern needs. Accordingly, he taught himself to accept the individual, even when he finds himself outside the established order, as the spearhead of moral improvement. Hardy derived a sense of security from the rural way of life portrayed in his early novels. Ancient customs are perpetuated in closely-knit communities. Work defines purpose. True love is rewarded. Life is peaceful and harmonious. Hardy acknowledges a possible source of danger in passivity of temperament and in the social pretensions of his women, but these are only possible dangers and the idyll triumphs. In his middle novels, Hardy pays more attention to the changes that were taking place around him, and he reevaluates the strength and worth of the old-world values in the light of more modern alternatives. These novels are described as experimental because Hardy’s attitude to the new social orders and their values is ambivalent. Here, however, and in three major late novels, Hardy describes the rural way of life as benighted and inadequate, unable to survive in the face of change. Consistently now a realistic ending brings defeat to the rustic hero and heroine. But in contrast to his admission of defeat for the old communities, Hardy learns to value the worth of the individual who flouts convention and community ties and evolves his own purposes in life. In early novels these men are the anti-heroes. In his last novels, Hardy studies them more closely. His antipathy gives way to admiration, and the anti-hero of his first novels, who stands outside the settled community, becomes the hero of his last. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

The object of the present study is to analyse and interpret Hardy's achievement in the field of tragedy. Critics have generally recognised the importance of his vast output of plays in the development of French drama in the seventeenth century, while denigrating the literary merit of his works. The only full-scale study of this dramatist, Rigal's Alexandre Hardy et le théâtre francais à la fin du XVIe siècle et au commencement du XVIIe siècle, is devoted largely to a consideration of his life and of theatrical conditions at this time, to a comparison of his plays with those of his precursors and followers, and to an examination of source material. The present study compares the plays one with another to determine what features they have in common, attempting to arrive thereby at Hardy's conception of the structure and function of tragedy. The text followed is that of Stengel's re-edition. The plays are analysed under the headings of plot and action, theme, and character. The first chapter studies Hardy's use of stage spectacle, presented action and reported action, and shows that, contrary to popular misconception, he does not indulge in gratuitous or excessive horror and violence on the stage. Rather he presents a situation in which the tragic hero is offered a choice of courses of action, the outcome of which will be fortunate or unfortunate according to the course chosen. The typical pattern of the action of a tragedy by Hardy is, therefore, a rising and falling, or falling and rising motion about a central scene of conflict. Sometimes this pattern is seen in the life of a single hero, sometimes the contrasting fortunes of two characters are presented. In the second chapter the moral principles of the protagonists are examined to determine the basic theme of the tragedies, which is found to be broadly political. Hardy presents a number of types of king, ranging from the tyrant to the perfect monarch, and renders this traditional ideological contrast in a series of discussions of the problems of kingship arising from a particular dramatic situation. Justice, clemency, the rule of law and service to the state are the guiding principles of the good king. A second, and more original aspect of this political theme, that of legitimacy and the right of conquest, is found in some of the tragedies. The third chapter shows that Hardy presents dynamic heroes who strive to attain an ideal of personal gloire. Some heroes fail to arrive at this ideal because they succumb to their passions at a crucial moment; others acquire personal fulfilment only to become aware of a greater sense of service to others. A moral dilemma arises from the conflict between the ideal of personal honour and that of the king's duty to the state. The latter is achieved only by self-abnegation, and one may establish a hierarchy of heroes, ranging from Hérode, in whom subjection to the passions leads to destruction of the personality, to Cirus, the embodiment of self-sufficiency. In the conclusion to this study the moral framework of Hardy's tragedies is shown to lie in the self-sufficiency and will to perfection of the hero who recognises only honour and justice as immutable principles external to himself. It is a conception of tragedy which includes not only degradation and despair, but also optimism and the exaltation of the human spirit. Plot summaries of Hardy's ten tragedies are given in an appendix. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure, the four novels often referred to as Hardy's 'major' fiction, display an extraordinarily unified vision of life. This thesis is an attempt to analyze the thematic material common to these four novels through an examination of the poetic techniques—imagery and symbolism— which Hardy uses to enhance and amplify his explicit comments. Patterns of contrast and conflict are basic to the structure of each of these four novels. The conflict which comprises the major theme of the works is developed on both external and internal levels. Externally, the conflict occurs between two worlds which Hardy establishes in the Wessex novels: the stable, traditional world of the peasant, and the uneasy, ever-changing world of modern, urban society. There are two groups of flat, non-developing characters in the novels, one for each of the two separate worlds which Hardy creates. They typify the values of the two worlds, functioning as choric groups speaking from opposed points of view. Most characters in the novels can be linked to one or the other of these two types by criteria such as their attitude toward religion, education, or the mechanization of life, and, more especially, their reactions to alcohol and musical rhythm, both of which act in these novels as touchstones to release the subconscious. Internally, the conflict occurs in major characters who, because of their mixed backgrounds, feel allegiance to the values of both these worlds. The leading character in each of these four novels is cleft by a deep inner schism: he has a conscious ambition or quest, usually of an idealistic nature; at the same time he feels the dark pull of the subconscious. Instinctual needs rise from the subconscious to betray his conscious purposes. The conflict is the universal one between spirit and flesh. Hardy's vision is both consistent and developing. In the four novels discussed, the same conflict between man's conscious striving after the ideal and his deep, subconscious needs prevails. But Hardy's understanding of the nature of this split in the human psyche grows, and his mode of rendering it evolves from a poetic, seemingly unconscious presentation toward increasingly explicit statement of the problem. As his perception develops, the key characters acquire more and more self-knowledge, progressing from the naivety which characterizes Clym Yeobright even at the end of The Return of the Native to the mature and penetrating appreciation of the human dilemma which Jude finally achieves. Jude the Obscure represents a natural culmination of Hardy's novel-writing career, for it contains a full and explicit statement of the problem which Hardy has been exploring in these novels. He could scarcely have said more without becoming didactic. Of all the characters in these four novels Jude Fawley is the most significant thematically, for he achieves the greatest breadth of vision, the fullest understanding of the inner conflict in man which is the central theme of Hardy's fiction. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

No description available.

No description available.

N/A / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

The intention of this study is to examine the use of non-realistic materials in the fiction of Thomas Hardy. Although on the surface Hardy's work appears to be in the realistic tradition, several of his prose fictions are really closer to romance, and all of them will, on examination, be found to contain at least some romance elements. In this study the term "romance" denotes a type of prose fiction which draws on non-realistic materials and which introduces situations that depart from the ordinary rules of probability. Closely connected to Hardy's predilection for romance is his use of myth, folklore, ballad motifs, symbolic episodes and evocative settings. These very diverse techniques do not necessarily originate in romance. Some of them are more commonly associated with poetry than with prose fiction. But they do blend easily into the romance atmosphere. They help to make a unity, create a mood and establish a world which is unique in the nineteenth-century novel. To read Hardy properly, it is therefore necessary to suspend disbelief in a way we are not normally expected to do in a realistic novel, and to approach his work more as we would that of a poet. Hardy was strongly influenced by the great Romantics, particularly by the Gothic aspects of their work. But he was also concerned with the attitudes of the nature poets --especially Wordsworth's --to man, God and nature. As an heir to the Romantics, Hardy grew up assuming nature to be the reflection of a divine order. The loss of faith that overcame him as a young man eroded this assumption, but, as happens with many of us, the emotional side of Hardy could not easily be reconciled to what his intellect ascertained to be the truth. This ambivalence gives rise to the characteristic tension in his work between reason and emotion, between the real and the unreal, between man-made codes of behaviour and the more natural physical urges of human beings. Hardy's intuitiveness is nowhere more evident than in his handling of the relations of the sexes. Hence his interest in the process of courtship. Above all, Hardy was impressed by the tremendous power of sexual desire and its tendency to deceive people and trap them in situations which thwart their ambitions and often doom them to unhappiness. I have chosen to examine the foregoing motifs in detail, as they appear in a limited number of Hardy's works, rather than to skim superficially over the bulk of the fiction and poetry in what would inevitably become a tedious survey. The introductory chapter briefly considers Hardy's upbringing and interests; it then examines the nonrealistic materials, particularly those from romance literature and from Romantic poetry, that appealed to Hardy's imagination. The next three chapters deal consecutively with Hardy's first three published novels --DesEerate Remedies, Under the Greenwood Tree and A Pair of Blue Eyes --minor fictions, but indicative of Hardy's characteristic themes and techniques. Chapters V and VI discuss two neglected works of Hardy's middle period --A Laodicean and Two on a Tower. Chapter VII considers two shorter fictions --"The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid" and "The Fiddler of the Reels". In an effort to show how the techniques derived from romance and Romanticism reached fruition in the Wessex novels, The l\'oodlanders has been chosen to complete the study. Critics usually condemn Hardy's minor fictions; nevertheless it can be shown that they are entirely characteristic of the man, that they contain episodes that are worthy of our attention and that their relative neglect is unfortunate. This study is therefore an attempt, on a modest scale, to right a certain imbalance in Hardy studies and to reveal the major themes and techniques of a popular though, in regard to part of his achievement, a slighted writer. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)