Before turning to a consideration of the disturbed textuality of Hardy's novels and poems themselves, and of how they might meaningfully be read as contemporary discourses within our own culture, it is necessary to offer a brief survey of how he has been read and critically constituted hitherto. No writer's work – and certainly that of no writer who has held a significant place in literary history – can now be studied in and for itself: it is too determinately shaped by, and encrusted with, the critical and cultural reading practices, judgements, and evaluations already made about it, and which it carries with it like a palimpsest. In a real sense, such critical attention largely predetermines our perception of the canonic texts which come down to us; and, in the case of a writer like Hardy – who is also recruited to the service of a national culture and heritage – it is very difficult to see behind this kind of mythic construction of his ‘characteristic’ features.

Hardy's early success as a novelist came with Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), then even more emphatically with Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). It is easy to see here the critical lineaments of one potent mythic ‘Hardy’ establishing itself more or less from the start; annalist of rural (‘peasant’) life in the West Country; creator of ‘Shakespearian’ rustics; nostalgic chronicler of a passing rural order; writer of poetic description of the natural world; knowing inventor of sparky women characters; potentially ‘gloomy’ analyst of the tragedy of Love, Fate, and Nature mocking the aspirations and pretensions of human beings. ‘Wessex’ – that ‘partly real, partly dream country’ (FMC, Preface, ‘1895–1902’), comprising roughly the six counties of the Anglo- Saxon Heptarchy (Somerset, Devon, Hampshire, Berkshire, and Wiltshire, with Dorset as its very centre) – does not explicitly arrive on (as) the scene until The Return of the Native (1878), for which Hardy supplied his own map of his fictional terrain. From here on, Hardy is ineluctably associated with Wessex, but, as his novel-writing career progressed with The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), Tess (1891), and Jude (1896), it is the darker side of his writing which is focused on and admired: his ‘tragic’ – almost ‘Greek’ – grasp of the ‘universal’ themes of human fallibility, Fate, Love, and Death.