|
Tim Prigo here, I am creating this website because I am currently in the British Literature course at Franklin Pierce
College. Being an English major and a junior, It is required of me at least have one website on tripod which says something
about my progress in the discipline. I am doing a research paper on the English author Thomas Hardy. This website will hopefully
serve as a good reference tool for me, and others who wish to learn more about the literary figure.
The Novelist
-
Most of his novels take place in the partly real, partly imaginary world of Essex
county. This was loosely based on Berkshire, Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, Somerset and Wiltshire counties in England
-
He kept newspaper clippings from various events, usually tragic in order to have a
real world foothold for many of his fictional situations. This also clues us into Hardy's mastership for poignant detail.
-
Far from the Madding Crowd is Hardy's first important novel and gave
him enough success as a literary figure to quit architecture and become a career writer.
-
Classified his finest work of prose as "Novels of character and enviroment." A pessimist
who emphasized the impersonal and generally negative powers of fate over working class people.
-
After Moving from London, Hardy wrote such novels as Tess of the d'Urbervilles
which attracted much criticism for the sympathy it showed to a "fallen woman." Hardy intended this to raise eyebrows of the
Victorian middle class.
-
Jude the Obscure was met with even stronger negative outcries. With
its frank treatment of sex and gruesome details of life and death, was often reffered to as Jude the Obscene. Furthermore, the
book strained his relations with current wife Emma Hardy as she was concerned people would take it as an autobiography
of her. The novel was often sold in brown paper bags at book merchants.
-
Despite Criticism, Hardy became an English literary celebrity with many blockbuster
novels under his belt he still resented the general literary public for the bad reception to his two greatest works.
-
He never wrote another novel.
|
|
Poet
-
In 1998 Hardy published a book of poems thirty years in the making entitled Wessex Poems.
-
He claimed that poetry was his first love.
-
Critics tolerated but did not celebrate his poetry on the whole.
-
He has been gaining poetic motion in recent years partly due to figure such as Philip Larkin.
-
His poems deal with issues of lose and disappointment in love and life, mankind's long struggle
against indifference to human suffering.
-
Many composers including Lee Hoiby, Gerald Finzi and Benjamin Britten set Hardy's poetic text
to music n several orchestral works.
|
