Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- 1 Introduction: Hardy our Contemporary?
- 2 The Life of Thomas Hardy
- 3 Hardy amongst the Critics
- 4 Hardy the Novelist
- 5 Hardy the Poet
- 6 Conclusion
- 7 Postscript: Hardy from Page to Screen
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
5 - Hardy the Poet
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- 1 Introduction: Hardy our Contemporary?
- 2 The Life of Thomas Hardy
- 3 Hardy amongst the Critics
- 4 Hardy the Novelist
- 5 Hardy the Poet
- 6 Conclusion
- 7 Postscript: Hardy from Page to Screen
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Summary
With the publication of Jude and The Well-Beloved, then, Hardy gave up writing prose fiction. The reasons for this may be summed up as follows. First, partly financial: when he could afford to stop producing novels, he did so; secondly, partly personal: the scandalized response of the late-Victorian moralizing lobby to Tess and Jude had seriously depressed him; thirdly, partly aesthetic: as the preceding chapter has sought to show, Hardy's fictional writing was increasingly pressing against the limits of nineteenth-century realist conventions, challenging and subverting them, and he seems to have reached a formal impasse in giving expression to his world-view. The Life, of course, as we saw earlier, invariably denigrates his novelwriting career and presents him as always primarily a poet, so to suggest that he was first a novelist and then a poet is to misrepresent him – at least in his own estimation; and on his shift of genre in the 1890s, it comments that, ‘if he wished to retain any shadow of self-respect’, he must abandon fiction and ‘resume openly that form of [literary art] which had always been instinctive with him … the change, after all, [being] not so great as it seemed. It was not as if he had been a writer of novels proper … ’ (Life, 291, emphasis added). That final loaded phrase is further amplified by a memorandum of March 1886 reflecting on the future of prose fiction:
novel-writing cannot go backward. Having reached the analytic stage it must transcend it by going still further in the same direction. Why not by rendering as visible essences, spectres, etc., the abstract thoughts of the analytic school? … Abstract realisms to be in the form of Spirits, Spectral figures, etc …. The Realities to be the true realities of life, hitherto called abstractions. The old material realities to be placed behind the former as shadowy accessories. (Life, 177)
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- Information
- Thomas Hardy , pp. 75 - 95Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1996