Thomas Hardy Essay Competition

Call for essays on Thomas Hardy worth 250 pounds

More Than a \u27Mere Painted Scene\u27: The Role of Theatricality and the Carnivalesque in \u27The Mayor of Casterbridge\u27

This essay examines the role of Thomas Hardy\u27s scenes of community theatre, drawing examples from Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, and The Mayor of Casterbridge. Only in such scenes from The Mayor of Casterbridge does Hardy employ Mikhail Bakhtin\u27s carnivalesque, reversing the roles of the spectator and the creator of spectacle, the supporting cast and the lead actor, in order to magnify the fall of protagonist Michael Henchard

Thomas Hardy and Education

Thomas Hardy wrote during a time of extraordinary growth in British education when the purposes of learning were being passionately questioned. This thesis situates Hardy’s writing both within and beyond these debates, showing how his writing avows a Victorian fascination with education while contesting its often rigid actualization in nineteenth-century society. This project places new emphasis on the range of educationalists that Hardy counted as friends. These included the dialect poet and early-Victorian schoolmaster, William Barnes; the influential architect of the 1870s board schools, Thomas Roger Smith; and the leader of late-century reforms to female teacher training colleges, Joshua Fitch. Caught between life in rural surroundings and systemized forms of education, Hardy's characters frequently endure dislocation from community and estrangement from natural environments as penalties of their intellectual development. Much previous scholarship has for this reason claimed education as a source of despair in Hardy’s writing. However, this thesis reveals the people and experiences which rigid institutions exclude, and foregrounds Hardy’s depiction of the natural environment as an alternative source of learning. Exploring Hardy's representations of education as both reflective of contemporary change and suggestive of new possibilities, chapters focus on aspects of education most resonant with Hardy's own life and central to his fiction, including the professionalization and training of schoolmistresses, the working-class movement for liberal education, educational architecture, and rural forms of education. By exploring connections between fiction and social and political concerns, the thesis demonstrates how the idea of education relates to some key characteristics of Hardy's writing, for example the observant onlooker and the native returned.The National TrustGreat Western Researc

Thomas Hardy: a study

Thesis (B.A.)--University of Oklahoma, 1903

Thomas Hardy and sensationalism

Thomas Hardy launched his career as a novelist by writing a sensation story in Desperate Remedies. Although he abandoned sensationalism in the next novel, he returned to sensation elements in A Pair of Blue Eyes; and after this, he continually exploited these elements in fiction. In this thesis, seven novels covering almost the whole of his career are analysed in order to show his progress and the sensation elements which contributed to this development. Chapter 1 discusses the sensation tradition in English fiction, the sensation novel and sensationalism. Chapter 2: moves into Desperate Remedies; it examines the influence of sensation fiction on this novel. It also shows Hardy’s personal interests—his concerns for marital and sexual problems and taste for striking stories—which had much to do with his persistent employment of sensationalism. In Chapter 3: A Pair of Blue Eyes and A Laodicean are discussed. While he made good use of sensation elements in the former, he failed to do so in the latter. Chapter 4 deals with Far from the Madding Crowd and The Return of the Native. This chapter illustrates his advance: he came to develop sensation elements into useful narrative devices contributing to plot, theme or character. It also demonstrates that by means of these elements he could tackle marital problems, a theme which he expounded upon with more intensity in his later fiction. The final chapter is devoted to Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. It shows that he explored fully the marital and sexual issues he had treated with increasing fervour. He was able to do this, for by the 1890s he was extremely adept at handling sensation devices

The Subversion of Traditional Gender Roles in Thomas Hardy’s \u27The Mayor of Casterbridge\u27

This essay examines Thomas Hardy\u27s understanding and subversion of gender roles in The Mayor of Casterbridge by focusing on the novel\u27s two most prominent characters and their respective progressions over the course of the narrative. Michael Henchard’s hypermasculine behavior and eventual undoing is juxtaposed with Elizabeth-Jane’s active rejection of the male gaze, as well as her unique role as a proxy for the reader. In his 1886 novel, Hardy questions the legitimacy of gender expectations by acknowledging and subsequently undermining patriarchal traditions

Galileo\u27s Verse

A response to Thomas Hardy\u27s statement If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone

The poetry of Thomas Hardy

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

Thomas Hardy: Scripting the Irrational

Through creative practice and critical engagement this thesis argues that film and television adaptations of the work of Thomas Hardy have failed to capture elements of his writing both in terms of content and form. Hardy’s writing is infused with references to the folkloric practices and beliefs that he grew up with in nineteenth-century Dorset; much of this folklore concerned itself with the irrational and the practice of witchcraft in particular. Hardy was also keen from the outset to explore adventurous narrative patterns, anticipating literary styles that were to come and this is mirrored in the form that the series takes and the attention given to it in the critical elements of the thesis. Yet these aspects of his work have been largely ignored by production companies in their quest to present Hardy’s work to the financially lucrative heritage market both here in the UK and in North America. This is a market in which the inclusion of any supernatural elements presented in a slightly challenging manner, would simply not fit with the kind of past they are recreating and their attempts to offer the nostalgia of a safe and rurally idyllic picture of nineteenth-century England. This practice-led thesis has involved scripting a five-episode mini-series for television with the aim of addressing this situation; the series, The Haunting of Mr Hardy, comprises adaptations of four of his dark short stories plus one original episode. The scripts will make an important contribution to knowledge about Hardy and their appearance is timely in that the contemporary television audience seem to have an increasing appetite for the weird and eerie, witnessed by the growing popularity of the folk horror genre. To most viewers it will be a little seen side of Thomas Hardy’s work and the series will be as much about their creator and narrator as the stories he is narrating