Modernism Integrated With Realism

Thomas Hardy was born in Dorset on June 2nd, 1840, and died on January 11th, 1928. As a child, he had a poor health and was taught by his mother before he went to school. At the age of 16, he began learning architecture and then worked as an architect for several years. At that time, in his spare time, Hardy wrote poems, which was his first and last of literary favorite. His first novel was finished in 1876, but was rejected by the publisher. Angrily he burned the scripts. However, in 1874, believing that he could support his family by writing, he retreated from architecture and put all his heart into writing. He was so productive that every two or three years he had one book published. In 1896, two of his most outstanding novels, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, invited severe attacks. Hence, Hardy announced to give up novel writing and confined his writing to poetry after that.Hardy started and ended his writing career with poetry, but was famous as a novelist, with more than 40 short stories and novelettes and 14 novels. In 1912, when he prefaced the Wessex novels and poems of Macmillan edition, Hardy classified his novels into three categories, Novels of Character and Environment, Romances and Fantasies, and Novels of Ingenuity, in the eyes of worldwide readers and researchers, Hardy had various styles and properties. When English and American readers and scholars spoke of Hardy, they first considered him a writer reflecting locality. Some English researchers andEuropean critics called him a naturalist writer. Marxist critics generallyclassified him as a critical realist. Feminist critics paid special attention to Hardy's extraordinary interest in and sympathy for women's character, psychology, behavior and fate. Psychoanalysts discovered many psychological structures and some factors of sub-consciousness in Hardy's novels. Besides, some Hardy scholars insisted that Hardy belonged to Victorian period. In China, Hardy's tragic novels drew much attention from critics who mainly discussed the ideological system of Hardy's works. With the further development of the research on Hardy, in recent years, critics began to probe into the artistic forms of Hardy's tragic novels. Nowadays, many critics think that Hardy made remarkable contributions to English literature with his novels' psychological insights, the intuitive description of his characters, and the profound mirroring power of his tragic novels.Centering on Hardy's several tragic novels, in the paper here, I mainly discuss and illustrate the argument that Hardy, as a great man of literature crossing two centuries, was the last but outstanding critical realist writers of the English Victorian period, and at the same time, there are many factors of modernism integrated in his realist novels, so he was the transitional bridge for English literature to enter its modern stage from the Victorian period.The whole paper consists of five chapters. Chapter One functions as a general introduction, giving a brief account of Hardy's life and his major experiences, and a gist of the narrative settings and main contents of the following three chapters. Hardy occasioned many critics' interest ever since he began writing. And these critics can generally be divided into two groups: traditional ones and modern ones. Making researches mainly on the ideological systems of Hardy's works, traditional critics think that the situation of the English society was well reproduced and reflected in Hardy's novels, and that Hardy was a great critical realist writer. However, modern critics holdthat Hardy made remarkable contributions to English literature with his novels' psychological insights, the intuitive description of his characters and the profound mirroring power of his tragic novels. Based on the two viewpoints mentioned above and centering on Hardy's several tragic novels, my paper mainly deals with the analysis of Hardy's realism and his tragic vision, and modernism integrated in his novels.Chapter Two is concerned with criticisms on Hardy at home an...