Another shift in the study of emergent American literatures that seems inevitable is a closer affiliation between the fields of ethnic literature and gay and lesbian literature, between minority discourse theory and queer theory. Understanding the ways in which the dynamics of emergence both change and do not change when the literature in question orients itself around sexuality rather than ethnicity is a conceptual task that is pressing in both of these fields.

Gay writing has, of course, been around since at least the time of Socrates and Sappho, but the idea of a self-constituted field called “gay and lesbian literature” did not exist before the era of gay liberation that began in 1969 and could not have existed before the latter part of the nineteenth century. The labels gay, lesbian, and homosexual take for granted a relatively recent idea: namely, the idea of sexual orientation, according to which same-sex erotic attraction, if present, constitutes an abiding and defining characteristic of personal identity. Indeed, it is thought that the term homosexuality did not exist before 1869, when it appeared in a pamphlet written by Karl Maria Kertbeny entitled “An Open Letter to the Prussian Minister of Justice.” Classical Greek has no word for “homosexual” because ancient Greek culture understood sexuality as a matter of preference rather than orientation, liable to change from occasion to occasion – at least as far as men were concerned. Describing the sexual practices of ancient Greece in The Use of Pleasure (1985), Michel Foucault argues that “the notion of homosexuality is plainly inadequate as a means of referring to an experience, forms of valuation, and a system of categorization so different from ours. The Greeks did not see love for one’s own sex and love for the other sex as opposites, as two exclusive choices, two radically different types of behavior.”

Flannery O’Connor’s passionate religious convictions were the central fact of her intellectual and aesthetic life, vastly outweighing in her view any of the ways her sensibility was shaped by her gender, her region, or her race. Although like the Agrarians of the preceding generation O’Connor saw the South as if not resisting the rush to an alienating, secular, and capitalist modernity, at least as not yet totally given over to it, she never sentimentalized the vocation of the subsistence farmer and did not have romantic ideas about traditionalism generally. She was as bitterly critical of the urban habit of life and of secular culture as the Agrarians were, and those characters who represented for her a modern, cosmopolitan, secular, Northern-oriented consciousness, such characters as Rayber of The Violent Bear It Away, Asbury Fox of “The Enduring Chill,” Julian of “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” or Hulga Hopewell of “Good Country People,” were subjected to a ruthless satire.

To say that religious issues mattered more to O’Connor than political ones did is not to say that O’Connor was blind to the political and cultural transformation of the South of her day, or that she had nothing to say about the integration struggle that was proceeding throughout the years of her career, although she never wrote about it as Warren did in Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South and Who Speaks for the Negro? or as Welty did in “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is set during the period immediately after the integration of buses, and contrasts, with irony in both directions, the attitudes toward race of the progressive Julian and his racist mother.

Some of Hardy's most striking dicta seem designed to make it difficult to speak of his aesthetics - seem, indeed, to embody a dogged or defiant anti-aestheticism. For, while some of his finest work, including two of his greatest novels and his first volume of verse, appeared in the 1890s, he was decidedly not of the nineties; and while he would never have come out in favor of “art for my sake” as aggressively as D. H. Lawrence, he would surely have given this stance his quietly firm endorsement. “The beauty of association,”he declares in a notebook entry dated 28 September 1877 and quoted in his autobiography, “is entirely superior to the beauty of aspect, and a beloved relative's old battered tankard to the finest Greek vase” (LW, p. 124). Such a statement implies aesthetic judgments based on criteria that are subjective, even secret, rather than those shared by any school, movement, period, or culture: as so often with Hardy, solipsism is not far away.

A consideration of the influence of contemporary religion, science, and philosophy on Hardy's writings requires some prefatory cautions. First, such influences often overlap, and identification of how they affected Hardy's work must sometimes be no more than a tentative pointing to diverse and complex sets of possible sources whose precise influence cannot be determined. Thus in Far from the Madding Crowd Gabriel Oak intervenes to protect Bathsheba's ricks from fire and storm, uses his knowledge to save her sheep, and in other ways acts consistently with the biblical teaching that man was given the responsibility of exercising dominion over nature. At the same time, Oak's conduct is congruent with Thomas Henry Huxley's argument in Man's Place in Nature that it is mankind's ethical responsibility to control a morally indifferent environment. However, Oak's actions are even more remarkably consistent with details of the philosophical analysis of man's moral relationship to the natural world in John Stuart Mill's essay “Nature” - though its date of publication makes that influence only barely possible. In this and many other such cases, questions of which, and to what degree, one or more possible sources - “religious,” “scientific,” or “philosophical”- might have affected what Hardy wrote cannot be resolved with any certainty.

From their first publication, the works of Thomas Hardy have been explicitly and obsessively associated with matters of gender. This is the case, not only because these texts confront and perpetuate ideas about sexual difference that were influential in Hardy's own time, but also because his vivid, contradictory, and often strange representations of sexual desire, like a series of cultural Rorschach tests, have continually elicited from his readers intense and revealing responses: the act of interpretation exposes unspoken assumptions that circulate in the historical moment of the interpreter, and Hardy's representations of sexuality are especially effective in making visible those particularized hermeneutical processes. Indeed, to study the changing responses to gender in Hardy's published works from 1871 to the present is, in effect, to trace a fairly detailed history of the ways in which sexuality has been constructed within the British Isles and North America since the late-Victorian period. This essay will offer, therefore, only a schematic summary of what, in my own historical moment, I consider to be the most significant responses to representations of sexual difference in Hardy's texts.

Essay titles are an attempt to say much in little, at once synoptic shorthand for the work which follows and for the whole area of intellectual enquiry to which it alludes. As such, they are susceptible to ambiguity and imprecision, and the title of the present essay is no exception. What is meant, we might ask, by “Critical Theory,”and is it synonymous with that other cognate phrase - “Literary Theory”? While the commonly made slippage between the terms demands urgent attention, it is way beyond the scope of an essay such as this. Let me clear the ground, therefore, by simply stating that I take “Literary Theory” primarily to be concerned with offering theoretical definitions of the nature of literature, and “Critical Theory” to be the articulation of theorized principles on which critical approaches to the analysis of literature are premised. The latter, at least, will be the working definition deployed in this essay. But even so, in its present formulation, the title remains ambiguous.

Central to all of the novels under discussion here is a story of love, courtship, and marriage. More particularly, for the central female character in each case, this central fable takes the form of an erotic or marital “double choice,” to use Franco Moretti's phrase; the woman is first attracted to the “right” partner, then distracted by one or more “wrong”partners before confirming - whether emotionally or formally - the “rightness”of the original choice. Also central to all three, though, is a perhaps less familiar story of class mobility and social allegiance, focused through the narrative structures of fluctuating economic fortunes, ownership of property, the accumulation of financial or social capital, trading, and inheritance. These two central points of concern are, of course, deeply interconnected, thematically and in narrative terms. The triangulated relationships of potential lovers represent marital choice as the primary mode of class transition for women; it is evident that, though Fancy, Bathsheba, and Grace have all received a good education, in each case it functions rather as a marital asset than as an alternative path for class mobility.

In the Victorian period, poetry was still the high genre of literature. Speaking of his early twenties, Hardy said: “A sense of the truth of poetry, of its supreme place in literature, had awakened itself in me” (LW, p. 415). “Poetry,” he said in 1912, “is the heart of literature” (PW, p. 246). As Hardy (born in 1840) began to write in the 1860s, the era of Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold was slowly changing into the era of Swinburne, Hopkins, and Hardy. This formulation would surprise contemporary Victorians, since Hopkins and Hardy's poetries were not well known until the twentieth century. Even in the twentieth century, while Hopkins became celebrated by the new critics, Hardy remained a controversial case as a poet, partly because of his fame as a novelist, partly because of certain characteristics of his verse that were less amenable than Hopkins's to the analytic methods of the new criticism. Yet now Hardy is seen as a primary source in the founding of a major stream of modern English poetry, as charted for example by Donald Davie. Only in the last half of the twentieth century has Hardy's major stature as a poet come to be assumed.

Although Hardy was, so remarkably, a twentieth-century poet as well as a nineteenth-century novelist, the date of his birth is now nearly one hundred and sixty years distant, the date of his death already seventy. His immense fame in his own lifetime aroused an inquisitiveness as to his personal life that he sought strenuously to resist, and since his death his continuing, even increasing, reputation and popularity have naturally attracted the attention of biographers. Notoriously, however, Hardy's concern for privacy extended beyond his own death, encompassed the destruction of most of his personal papers and the composition of his own posthumously published official “life,”and was endorsed (even though they agreed on little else) by his literary executors.

In these circumstances, and at this distance in time, it seems appropriate to stand back a little from the narrative preoccupations of biography proper and attempt some examination of the sources currently available for the study of Hardy’s life and career. Of particular importance are those documentary materials (notebooks, letters, manuscripts) already in print or on microfilm, their wide accessibility enabling students and readers everywhere to approach Hardy directly and establish a “personal” relationship independent of - though not necessarily uninformed by - the published biographies. Such firsthand experiences can be enriching in themselves, and the starting-points of individual scholarship. They can also serve as touchstones by which to assess the tone, temper, and interpretive biases of different biographers and interrogate not only the adequacy and accuracy of their evidence but also the specificity, or absence of specificity, with which the sources of that evidence are identified. At the very least, they sharpen awareness of just how “knowable” a figure Hardy is now or ever can be.

Jude the Obscure is an account of the doomed existence of the protagonist named in the title, from the moment he is first inspired by a rural schoolmaster to think of a university education as the highest possible attainment, to his dying alone, while hearing celebratory shouts and organ notes in the distance from Remembrance Day at Christminster University, a place which has given not the slightest heed to his ambitions. Between these two moments are twenty years of self-directed study, and defeats in sex and love inflicted on him by two women, one sensual and pragmatic, the other intellectual and intensely seeking.

The intellectual woman, Sue Bridehead, is Jude's cousin. In effect she is the novel's co-protagonist although not named in the title; she is arguably Hardy's most challenging character to understand. Jude's mother and Sue's father were siblings, and had experienced disastrous marriages, the basis for one of the novel's minor themes, that some people are poor candidates for marriage. On top of what is taken to be a family curse is the reprehensible and constricting nature of marriage itself as Jude and Sue perceive it. The times and their own personalities conspire to thwart their best intentions and hopes. Well-meaning, intermittently sensitive to the other’s needs while usually insistent upon the inherent justice of his and her own needs, the couple interact with a rawness of ego that includes lacerating self-condemnation. The novel’s characterizing tone is bitterness, seemingly unmediated because the narrator shares the characters' sense of outrage that society censures both their unconventional sexual relations and their idealism.

Hardy among the modernists

As with literary Romanticisms, a variety of literary modernisms can be described, and no description of modernism as a singular, determinate movement will gain universal assent. Among the varieties of poetic modernism, Thomas Hardy's is distinctive because of its class-inflected, skeptical, self-implicating tendencies. The modernity of Hardy's poetry reveals itself in highly ambiguous language, in a resistance to conventional attitudes and hierarchies involving nature and society, in the transforming of lyric traditions, and in an insistence by means of negativity on the possibility of achieving a defiant, permanently revolutionary freedom to choose and to refuse. It is worth admitting at the outset, however, that any depiction of Hardy's modernism is of necessity a selective affair. There is evidence of Hardy's modernity in poems that span the entire period of his career as a publishing poet from 1898 through 1928. Considering that Hardy's collected poetry consists of more than nine hundred texts, not including The Dynasts, a variety of patterns and tendencies can be identified. Primary to my reading of his modernity are poems that reflect on nature and on Romantic attitudes, war poetry, elegies, and poems that use negative language prominently.

Chapter 2 of Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) opens by describing Marlott, the village where Tess was born. But the passage goes beyond mere description by providing the reader with important aesthetic directives. After locating the village geographically in “the Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor” and noting that tourists and landscape painters have usually avoided the valley, Hardy's narrator predicts that its beauty will attract future visitors. Yet he quickly chills the enthusiasm of such prospective viewers. After initially asserting that the fertile spot never succumbs to dried-up springs or brown fields, he now calls attention to the “droughts of summer” only to recite further obstacles: poor ways to travel, difficult roads, and consequent disappointments one might want to avoid. The narrator then reverses himself again by insisting that any traveler from the coast will inevitably be “delighted” by contrasts between the calcareous downs and lush cornlands (T, ii, p. 18).

The word Wessex was, until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a purely historical term defining the south-western region of the island of Britain that had been ruled by the West Saxons in the early Middle Ages. But since Hardy unearthed the word and used it in his novels and poems, it has come to mean to more and more people a district - to some degree coterminous with the Saxon kingdom - populated by characters sprung from the novelist's imagination. Indeed, Wessex has come to mean the whole culture - predominantly rural and pre-industrial - found in Hardy's novels and poems. So powerful and widely disseminated has been Hardy's imaginative creation that even during his lifetime, Wessex was being used once again in the traffic of everyday life to denote a region of vague extent in south-western England. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, a glance at a directory to any town to the south and west of Oxford will probably throw up a business or two with Wessex in its name; and this is Hardy's doing.

Wessex as Hardy left it for his readers when he died in 1928 has been the subject of many illuminating critical and descriptive studies, made from a range of points of view. But there is one fundamental truth about Wessex that has scarcely been recognized, nor have its implications been considered: it is that the complex social and environmental organization that readers and critics think of as Hardy’s Wessex did not exist in the novelist’s imagination when he first began to write, and, as this chapter sets out to show, did not exist in anything like the form we are now accustomed to, until the writing of his last three novels, and more particularly until the publication of the first collected edition of his work in 1895-96.

According to Peter Szondi, a crisis in European drama occurs around 1880. The reason for this crisis is essentially generic: drama is no longer absolute and primary (unfolding as a linear sequence in the present), but relies for its effect on narrative elements incorporated into the dramatic structure. Szondi's main example is Henrik Ibsen, in whose plays - such as Ghosts (1881) and The Wild Duck (1884) - the thematic significance of the actions, dreams, and desires of the main characters is inseparable from their past histories as unravelled through the playwright's sophisticated retrospective technique. “Here the past is not, as in Sophocles' Oedipus, a function of the present.”

Like most turning-points in literary form, the crisis Szondi identifies in European drama in the late nineteenth century is productive in that it precipitates the formal experimentation of twentieth-century drama. Szondi's notion of crisis also implicitly accentuates the link between various forms of generic interplay and the ways in which the characteristic features or sub-genres of one particular genre can be combined. In the genre of drama, Ibsen's dramaturgic use of the past is partly motivated by his understanding of tragedy.

Britten's folksong arrangements – mainly from the British Isles, with their gallery of lovers, soldiers, sailors, characters and genre scenes drawn from rural life – are strongly representative of the ‘English’ Britten and span a working life that extends from the time just before the return to England (and Peter Grimes) in 1942 to the stricken composer's last summer in 1976. Here is the composer who worked with the English language, whose feeling for oddity, humour and peculiar sentiment – for particularity – was rooted in a sense of place, in what remained (despite a widely travelled artist's sophistication) a villager's sense of local character: the kind of curiosity that prompted Forster to write on Crabbe or William Plomer to lecture on ‘Old Fitz’. Much of this feeling was strongly linked to an attraction towards – perhaps even a kind of nostalgia for – what might be termed the ‘expressive character and modes’ of life in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England (the period settings, after all, of Peter Grimes, Albert Herring, The Little Sweep, Billy Budd, etc.). Britten's own native Suffolk – with its strong Victorian sea-side associations, its buildings and maritime history – still visually recalls this period, that saw the accumulation and collection of folk and ‘national’ songs dealing with a rapidly vanishing rural way of life. What makes this oeuvre distinct, however, is its absolute removal from the kind of ‘Englishness’ that maybe associated with the Edwardian pomp and pageantry of Elgar, or later characterized in the watery meadows and ‘gaffers on the green’ modal meanderings and rustic frolics of the school of the English folklorists.

The success of Peter Grimes owes much to Britten's convincing use of substantial forces; his creation of appropriately powerful and imposing textures for the depiction of sea, storm and the social menace of a crowd bent on vengeance and retribution. Grimes is grand opera after the model of Verdi, Puccini, Berg and Gershwin, a genre which aimed to hold and persuade a substantial audience in a large theatre. Yet this was not how opera, music drama, had first been conceived, and by the middle of the twentieth century it seemed clear to many composers that the romantic and late-romantic eras had explored only one of the ways in which music and drama might interact.

Britten's interest in such precedents for a more intimate kind of music theatre as Dido and Aeneas and The Beggar's Opera would have been sharpened by his regard for twentieth-century compositions like Holst's Sāvitri (three singers, at most twelve players in the orchestra) and various works by Stravinsky (Renard, The Soldier's Tale) which turned their backs on opera as traditionally conceived. In a manifesto of 1946 Britten put the point with characteristic directness: ‘I am keen to develop a new art-form (the chamber opera, or what you will) which will stand beside the grand opera as the quartet stands beside the orchestra. I hope to write many works for it.’ The impulse behind this ‘new art-form’ was nevertheless not purely aesthetic.