Concept
Thomas Hardy
Overview
Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist, poet and architect. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wordsworth. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain such as those from his native South West England.
While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, he gained fame as the author of novels such as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895). During his lifetime, Hardy's poetry was acclaimed by younger poets (particularly the Georgians) who viewed him as a mentor. After his death his poems were lauded by Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin.
Many of his novels concern tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances, and they are often set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex; initially based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Hardy's Wessex eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in south-west and south central England. Two of his novels, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, were listed in the top 50 on the BBC's survey of best-loved novels, The Big Read.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
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This is the historical explanation, and at the same time the refutation, of the subversive schemes so prevalent in our time, of which the object is to establish a sort of aristocracy of literary pedants. Such day-dreams of unbridled self-conceit find favour only with the metaphysical minds who cannot sanction exceptional cases without making them into an absolute rule.
Auguste Comte, A General View of Positivism Or, Summary exposition of the System of Thought and Life
States what Thomas Hardy is; the author is tied to Thomas Hardy in the knowledge graph.
Neither is his a cramped and contracted notion of human excellence, which cares only for certain forms of development. He not only personally appreciates, but rates high in moral value, the creations of poets and artists in all departments, deeming them, by their mixed appeal to the sentiments and the understanding, admirably fitted to educate the feelings of abstract thinkers, and enlarge the intellectual horizon…
John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism
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He attached much less importance than formerly to outward changes; unless accompanied by a better cultivation of the inward nature. He had a strong distaste for the general meanness of English life, the absence of enlarged thoughts and unselfish desires, the low objects on which the faculties of all classes of the English are intent. Even the kind of public interests which Englishmen care for, he held in very little…
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography
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Philosophers who discussed Thomas Hardy
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- Globe Pequot Publishing Group
- Matthew Arnold
- Anglicanism
- George Eliot
- Auguste Comte
- Henri Bergson
- John Stuart Mill
- University of Toronto Press
- Metaphysics
- Columbia University Press
- The Guardian
- BBC
- Leslie Stephen
- St. Martin's Press
- John Cowper Powys
- Irony
- Victorian literature
- Nobel Prize in Literature
- Charles Fourier
- Romanticism
- T. S. Eliot
- J. M. E. McTaggart
- Virginia Woolf
- Victorian era
Place in the tradition
Part of Philosophy and literature.