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Thomas Hardy's Groundwork

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Daniel Wright
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Abstract

Thomas Hardy strategically exposes what he calls the “groundwork” of his fictional worlds in scenes depicting blizzards or total darkness that scrub away all points of orientation. When Hardy reveals the empty field—”forms without features”—within which the details of the novel take shape, he aims to investigate the ontological, rather than epistemological or aesthetic, questions raised by novelistic realism. By tracing Hardy's groundwork through several novels, primarily Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), the essay shows that Hardy's vexed relation to the realist tradition arises out of the metaphysical paradoxes endemic to novelistic mimesis.

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Type
Research Article
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PMLA , Volume 134 , Issue 5 , October 2019 , pp. 1028 - 1041
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2019

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