Chapter 3, “Hardy and the Vanity of Procreation,” begins by noting that the notorious infanticide-suicide in Jude the Obscure has always posed a riddle for critics: laboring to make sense of it, they often treat it as an aberration in Thomas Hardy’s work. This chapter takes a different view. Father Time’s grotesque flourish is not simply a piece of Malthusianism, or an affront to the Victorian reader, but rather a kind of culmination of Hardy’s career-long struggle to integrate procreation, the fulfillment of creating new life, into his fiction and poetry. In Hardy’s novels reproduction is nearly always thwarted or suspended: this is consistent with his many expressions of distaste, throughout his verse and private writings, for the ongoingness of new life. Like Schopenhauer (whom he read), Hardy suggests that creating new persons is a kind of aesthetic-moral error. This chapter asks how the novel – a form of art usually considered dynamic, vital, and vibrant – can accommodate such a challenge to its very foundations.

Thomas Hardy was the first poet that Seamus Heaney discovered in his boyhood in Mossbawn, where poems set to memory and scenes from the novels began to shape an earth-rooted poetic in which he envisioned the poet as Antaeus and the poem as a ploughshare turning over ancestral ghosts and disappearing objects for the poetic reconstitution of a vanishing 'country of the mind'. When he eventually discovered Yeats, Eliot and other modern poets indifferent to Hardy, he saw their modern visionary and intellectual poetics as his Hercules, writing in 'Antaeus and Hercules' of their threat to his earthbound poetics as 'pap for the dispossessed'. Heaney’s full engagement with the moderns was accompanied by regular retreats into his Hardy haven and identification with Kavanagh, Auden, Larkin and others sympathetic to the Hardy tradition. The Antaeus-Hercules conflict was not to become a feared defeat but a liberating reconciliation borne of his study of the Hardy-Yeats-Eliot breakthroughs into the miraculous, discovering through them the balance of earth and lift essential to great poetry.

In Greek tragedies and in Hardy’s tragic novels, plots beyond our control destroy our good character, while we or others lament this injustice and envision events otherwise. In such moments of counter-narrative rebellion, both the impassioned narrator of Tess of the d’Urbervilles and the titular character of Jude the Obscure attack the logics of rape culture and victim-blaming that, in Greek tragic fashion, descend on their heroines from without and degrade them beyond recognition. This chapter contrasts Hardy’s theory of tragedy with the Aristotelian model of tragedy in which protagonists themselves inadvertently cause their demises. Hardy’s sense of tragedy is different, too, from the Christian model in which heroines fall because of their moral vices. Like Greek tragedies, Hardy’s novels show extrahuman and anthropogenic sources of suffering that cannot be justified. In particular, Hardy’s tragedy decries the notion of scapegoating, which understands the exile or elimination of the “other” to cleanse the community.

Chapter Seven marks a turn away from consideration of ways in which the material presence of the map bears upon authorial and readerly meaning-making, to ways in which the absence, or internalisation, of the map affects the reader’s engagement with the text. Literary mapping is unusual by comparison with maps in other disciplines, in that the question of why a map is not present, or is withheld, can be of as much interest as its presence. This chapter addresses a question that implicitly emerges from the earlier chapters: why do maps occur so frequently in popular genres but extremely infrequently in canonical texts (especially the realist novel)? After exploring this issue through debates around realism and representation in France and Britain, the chapter considers two rare canonical authors who do use maps in relation to the realist novel: Trollope and Hardy. (141)

This chapter examines the antagonistic relationship with Nietzsche’s Greeks that was managed by one of the main writers of modernism, D. H. Lawrence. By thinking about the position of Nietzsche in the British intellectual climate of the early twentieth century, and in particular his association to the anti-Germanic feeling surrounding the First World War, this chapter contextualises the tension between Lawrence’s antipathy towards Nietzsche and the clear resonances between the two authors’ attitudes towards the irrational nature of ancient Greece. The chapter examines the differing attitudes towards tragedy that Lawrence puts forward across his voluminous writings, including especially his 1920 novel Women in Love, his critical-theoretical essay ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ (written 1914/1915, published posthumously in 1946), and his travel writings about his visits to Etruscan tombs. It uses the idea of the ‘gay science’, which Lawrence took from Nietzsche’s work of the same name from 1882, to situate Lawrence’s desire to establish an anti-tragic form of art and literature with a genealogy that stretches back to antiquity.

This chapter argues that the British 1880s sees the emergence of powerful forces of political idealism, sceptical of evangelical calls to religious salvation but offering, instead, uplifting forms of ‘discursive Christianity’ in which high-minded routes to social salvation draw on Christian ideals but are modified to address the social problems of the day. The play of such a diffused Christianity is examined in the fiction of William Hale White (‘Mark Rutherford’). It then examines how George Gissing, with his commitment to realism in the novel, faces the aesthetic challenge of representing, authentically, political idealism, as expressed through polemic and forms of speech-making. Gissing’s solution is an ‘impersonal’ mode of presentation and an increasingly satiric treatment of vocal performance. Gissing’s scepticism about the limits of oratorical performance is seen as symptomatic of a wider artistic disenchantment with the strategies of Victorian high-mindedness, as in the satiric proto-modernism of late Hardy. In the light of the modernist diffusion of aesthetic and cultural detachment from the ethical and political imperatives of late-Victorianism into the inter-war period, it falls to later twentieth-century criticism to re-start serious evaluation of the innovatory character of the interplay of social, political and aesthetic life in the British 1880s.

This chapter explores intersections between animals produced for human consumption, liberal inclusion, and biopolitics, another strategy of governmentality. I first examine mid-century cattle industry reform and concerns over the treatment of animals raised for human consumption. By embracing notions of animal capital and profit to better regulate animal lives, animal welfare discourse showed how animal bodies can negatively or positively affect the wealth of the nation, depending on their treatment. I contrast this biopolitical discourse with Thomas Hardy’s concerns over the treatment of cattle, and his desire for animal justice and equality. After examining his own animal welfare, especially concerns about the cattle industry, I analyze his novel about shepherding and pastoral power, Far from the Madding Crowd, which employs what I call an affirmative biopolitical realism. Through focusing on the lives of sheep and enhancing them with his biopolitical realist techniques, Hardy offers an alternative ethic for relating with animals that values animals outside capitalist discourses of profit, ultimately positing a liberal inclusion that welcomes animals.

This chapter explores intersections between animals produced for human consumption, liberal inclusion, and biopolitics, another strategy of governmentality. I first examine mid-century cattle industry reform and concerns over the treatment of animals raised for human consumption. By embracing notions of animal capital and profit to better regulate animal lives, animal welfare discourse showed how animal bodies can negatively or positively affect the wealth of the nation, depending on their treatment. I contrast this biopolitical discourse with Thomas Hardy’s concerns over the treatment of cattle, and his desire for animal justice and equality. After examining his own animal welfare, especially concerns about the cattle industry, I analyze his novel about shepherding and pastoral power, Far from the Madding Crowd, which employs what I call an affirmative biopolitical realism. Through focusing on the lives of sheep and enhancing them with his biopolitical realist techniques, Hardy offers an alternative ethic for relating with animals that values animals outside capitalist discourses of profit, ultimately positing a liberal inclusion that welcomes animals.