Modern City as the Source of Tragedy in Thomas Hardy’s Major Novels

This study examines the perpetual suffering of the farmers, agricultural workers, and peasants who were forced to abandon their habitat from Wessex and settle in big industrial cities of England. This forced migration was due to the industrialization and mechanization of the rural areas of Wessex which finally led to the environmental destruction during the critical period of the nineteenth century in the history of England. The peasants and farmers, who lost all sources of living, were heading towards the big cities in the hope of finding a new opportunity and a better way of living. As a result of this displacement, the moral and the social values of the English peasantry changed greatly. The life of the displaced farmers, agricultural workers, and peasants underwent powerful transformations as a result of the social change in the cities. There, they faced unforgettable social problems that destroyed the dreams and aspirations of most of them in life. The anguish and the agonies of the afflicted group of the farmers, agricultural workers, and peasants are vividly reflected in Thomas Hardy’s major novels. The Mayor of Casterbridge focuses on the tragic plight of the English peasantry when they come into contact with the people from the cities. Jude the Obscure (1895) portrays the disappointment and the tragedy of the ambitious countrymen who think that the glitter of the industrial cities offers them more happiness than the simple beauty of the rural society.

The Telegraphic Principle in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

This chapter concerns the attitudes, practices, and figures of speech that during the course of the nineteenth century prepared the way for the eventual separation of the idea of the signal from that of the sign. It has to do with the emergence of the telegraphic principle (initially by means of the Napoleonic-era optical telegraph) as a thrillingly effective implementation of remote intimacy. Its main focus is on the intimacies developed remotely, by signal rather than sign, in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and in novels by Thomas Hardy: in particular, A Pair of Blue Eyes, The Return of the Native, A Laodicean, Two on a Tower, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, and The Well-Beloved. In Hardy’s fiction, sexual desire expresses itself in, or as, an adjustment of signal-to-noise ratio. The Wessex the novels map is at times less a terrain than the basis for a telecommunications system.

Class, Culture, and Killing

In the final volume of a trilogy about the concept of culture and its relation to politics, Francis Mulhern defines a new genre, the condition of culture novel, and traces it from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and E. M. Forster’s Howards End to Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, reading off from it middleclass anxieties about the rise of the working-class movement. What does it mean about the novel or about the working-class movement itself that so many working-class characters are killed off by their aspiration to culture or are presented as murderers of their so-called superiors? Is the aspiration itself fundamentally flawed, or is the flaw in the novels? Mulhern’s persuasive allegorical readings can be read as a fascinating application of the Greimasian semiotic square as well as a renewal of Mulhern’s epic debate with the intellectual historian Stefan Collini, in the pages of New Left Review, over the proper relation between culture and politics.