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This chapter discusses nervous degeneration and its literary representation in the 1890s. Much of the fiction of the 1890s self-consciously engages with the physical and medical sciences to configure the new disease of ‘neurasthenia’, a nervous malady which came to be both casually and symbolically linked to the period. George Gissing's The Whirlpool and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure are novels which situate narratives of nervous breakdown at the problematic intersection of biological theories of determinism and cultural anxieties about the alleged deleterious effects of modern life. The aim of this chapter is to look beyond the particulars of plot and personality which link these books thematically to New Woman fiction in order to reveal the extent of the influence of the biological and physical sciences in creating a culture of unease around the issue of sexual equality.

This chapter examines the stories in Thomas Hardy's Wessex Tales. It notes that most of the stories are set at least thirty-five years before their telling in the volume, and that ‘Wessex’ is described as an environment where uncluttered spaces provided freedom of movement. The chapter first discusses Hardy's verbal descriptions, which were influenced by his experiences with viewing the landscape through big brass telescopes. It reveals that Hardy's experience at Rushy-Pond – along with his telescope – was part of his inspiration for his stories in Wessex Tales. The chapter then shows how the telescope serves to figuratively and practically emphasise Hardy's focus on his object, which leaves everything else temporarily invisible. The rest of the chapter examines certain aspects of the stories in Wessex Tales, including the importance of the human figure, the role of the executioner, the allusions to galvanism and photography, and rivalry between women.

In October 1870, Rome and Latium were annexed by the kingdom of Italy and in July 1871 Rome was made capital. In the years that followed the city was radically transformed. This process exacerbated conflicts between visitors and inhabitants over who could claim to be Rome's true heirs — a conflict that Risorgimento nationalism had generated since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Qualms about the new Rome and the relations to the past it permitted or blocked can be found in much writing of the late nineteenth century. Unexpectedly, perhaps, given his reputation as a regionalist, they are explored with particular intelligence by Thomas Hardy, in writing that followed his single journey to Rome in 1887. Particularly in his sequence, ‘Poems of Pilgrimage’, published in Poems of the Past and the Present (1902), Hardy reflected on how far the Romantic inheritance might still be found, overlaying the classical scene.

In her 1878 dystopic essay ‘Shadows of the Coming Race’, George Eliot went so far as to imagine the disappearance, not only of intellectual property, but of its necessary corollary — the individual consciousness. Just as improved printing technologies had affected the debate on intellectual property in England in the 1830s, so new electrical applications posed a renewed threat to the notion of the single author in the last decades of the century. Fears about the transmission of information across vast distances, untethered from origins, and no longer ‘belonging’ to individuals or places, caused Thomas Hardy to reflect upon the dangers of new technologies and media. The growth of the electricity industry and the explosion of the publishing market are not such separable phenomena as they first seem. This chapter also looks at Hardy's views on issues related to both domestic and international copyright.

This chapter examines the portrayal of unnatural childhood in Thomas Hardy's novel Jude the Obscure. The novel was influenced by the over-pressure debates of the 1880s and associated concerns with child suicide, but placed them in a new light. This chapter describes a scene from this novel where the narrator superimposed on the childhood sorrow of the character of Jude an adult's pessimistic vision of a Darwinian struggle for existence which overturns the comforting religious order of natural theology.

This book is about Thomas Hardy, an English novelist and poet whose legal career began in 1894 when he was appointed county magistrate, and his fiction in relation to legislative and literary history. It situates Hardy’s legal fiction within the legal consciousness of the late nineteenth century and its pervasive preoccupation with the law. It argues that Hardy’s work was shaped both by his awareness of individual cases and acrimonious debates over legal reforms, that he was influenced by sensation fiction and its legal plot lines, and that his open-ended narratives provoke his readers to examine legal issues which he leaves unanswered in a modernist form of training in judicial reasoning. These issues range from the limits of counsel to the definition of legal insanity, legal protection of women from abusive relationships and fundamental social inequalities exacerbated by the reform of land law. Finally, the book considers how Hardy’s fiction offers pseudo-legal representation in narratives that mirror the dialogic form of trial procedure.

This chapter explores the war poetry of Thomas Hardy. His credentials as witness were important to Hardy and that war poems were, emphatically, eyewitness accounts, claiming an authority denied to absentees. The witness does more than merely see: he testifies to the truth of contentious and possibly even criminal events. This emphasis on experience over hearsay and propaganda is affirmed many times by war poets throughout the following century.

This chapter talks about how people learn to feel alone and sustained, rather than alone and persecuted, lost, adrift, untethered. On loneliness and character in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the chapter describes the way people internalize novelistic structures and come to feel like literary characters. Like Tess, readers imagine that others are with them, narrating and experiencing their lives alongside them, even when they are alone. Alone with others, Tess introduces a notion of paradoxical solitude that D. W. Winnicott would explicitly theorize more than half a century later, as a fact of psychic life in his essay “The Capacity to Be Alone.” The chapter also shows how Thomas Hardy anticipates Winnicott's theory of relational solitude by making and unmaking his character Tess, who becomes an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations—an internalized presence—to her readers as much as to herself, and who seems to likewise sense the presence of the narrator and the reader in the world of the story.

This chapter focuses on The Return of the Native and Michael and Enid Balint, which both investigate how spaces are never simply themselves but instead are repeatedly figured through metaphor and allusion and atmospherically charged with feeling, racial politics, and overlapping imperial geographies. The chapter also analyzes restlessness and setting that turns from the ways reading Thomas Hardy's fiction can afford in opportunities for rest and unintegration to the “unrest” that undergirds his picture of life. It shows the geographic restlessness of Hardy's figurative practice. The long lyrical passages in Hardy's prose punctuate the feeling of doom that suffuses his fiction and offer us a respite from his shocking plots. And yet, Hardy's descriptions of place move through allusions, historical references, and “similes and metaphors” at a breathless rate.

This chapter examines Thomas Hardy’s legal fiction in relation to gender inequality and the double standard underpinning the law. It considers the legal disabilities experienced by women in their relationships with men, as well as women’s legal non-existence under coverture. It shows how the Matrimonial Causes Act further exacerbated women’s marital woes by granting divorce to men on the grounds of adultery but requiring female plaintiffs to prove that their husbands' adultery was compounded by additional aggravation such as bigamy or incest. The chapter looks at the limited legal redress offered by the Matrimonial Causes Acts of 1857 and 1878 in the context of fin de siècle feminism and how Hardy’s novels exposed the economic and social factors operating on women, and hence sustaining abusive marriages. The emphasis is on how Hardy’s fiction addresses the uncertain definition of marital cruelty.

This chapter gives a critical understanding of rhyme as a difficult aspect of stylistic criticism, looking at the complex relationship with literary history. The chapter then considers Elizabeth Barrett Barrett in the 1840s and later, and the problems posed for (and by) her in rhyme; Barrett's debts to, and departures from, Byron and Wordsworth in rhyme; Barrett's ode ‘sounds’ and Wordsworth's ode ‘On the Power of Sound’; and Barrett's multiple refigurings of Wordsworth's ‘Intimations’ ode. The chapter then considers A. C. Swinburne and the ‘submission’ to rhyme; Swinburne and Keats, with a close reading of ‘Before Parting’; Swinburne's ‘By the North Sea’; and debts to Keats's and Wordsworth's rhymes. The chapter next considers rhyme's diminishing returns for Swinburne's verse; Swinburne and Keats in Thomas Hardy's ‘The Darkling Thrush’; Hardy, rhyme, and meaning, with a close reading of his ‘The Voice’ in relation to Swinburne's ‘At Parting’; and Hardy's rhymes and their debt to Keats's Nightingale Ode in a close reading of ‘The Shadow on the Stone’. Finally it describes Hardy and connections between dream, rhyme, and reality.

With Thomas Hardy, this book comes to the first canonical British novelist to take an active interest animal-welfare and anti-cruelty politics—which had moved from the margins to closer to the mainstream in the decades since the 1824 founding of the SPCA (later the RSPCA). This chapter considers Hardy’s representation of animal life and animality both as important in its own right, and as deeply intertwined with his depiction of human life. It does so through a consideration of various Hardy texts and aspects of his biography, but especially through a reading of what is defined as the “pastoral plot” of Far From the Madding Crowd. This novel teaches its readers to “pity the sheep” and to push beyond an exclusively human-centered perspective. To pity the sheep is to “follow after” and live with the animal, to be willing to risk symbolic infection from proximity to the non-human. Hardy’s shepherd Gabriel Oak represents a new kind of protagonist for the Victorian novel, one who achieves his status not by asserting but by giving up the privilege of casting out the animal from the space of the human and the home.

This chapter reads the most abject novel in the English canon and finds unexpected cause for optimism. Jude the Obscure makes a relentless tragedy fueled by criticizing institutions and exclusions, laws and harms. But it also exhibits great wonder at the constructions common to non-Euclidean geometry and human social schemes. Hardy described his text as “geometrically constructed,” and he crafted a novel that engages geometry imagistically, discursively, and narratologically. The chapter reads that engagement as instantiating a surprising exuberance about the shape of lines and letters, and consequently projecting the malleability of social lineaments, even as the novel tells the tale of lethally rigid norms.Through its geometric structure, Jude the Obscure contemplates the obscurity of social forms, an ambiguity and complexity deemphasized in biopolitical theory and anarchovitalism, but central to the constructive criticism in political formalism.