Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles is motivated by questions surrounding the legibility of character, and it begins to associate those questions with the increasing economic and cultural influence of London. As an ostensibly provincial novel, Tess is an important test case for the claim that the financialization of the British economy was accompanied by a cultural turn toward London. This chapter argues that Tess is in fact a London novel as it depicts a provincial Wessex infused with the economic and spatial logic of London, a logic that poses problems for the reading of character in the novel, as it depicts Angel Clare mistakenly interpreting Tess’s character through a pastoral rather than urban hermeneutic.

The first chapter traces the notion of “art for art’s sake” to the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, who first engaged with questions of aesthetics in the early 1850s. In their attempts to account for the evolution of the sense of beauty – an adaptation with no obvious survival value – both writers exempted a wide swath of aesthetic activities from the natural laws of scarcity and struggle that governed other areas of biological life. This chapter argues that their evolutionary explanations for beauty (the theories of sexual selection and “play," respectively) thus laid the scientific groundwork for later conceptions of aesthetic experience as escapist, salutary, and therefore beneficial for the species. The chapter concludes with an analysis of selected literary works by Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and George Meredith, whose respective corpuses illustrate the diffuse impact of these ideas on literary evocations of the beautiful.

As a temporal form, irony directs narrative toward self-critique at the scale of both the individual narrator’s personal memory and the nation’s or empire’s cultural heritage. Chapter 4 parses the threefold irony in William Thackeray’s travel writing, which critiques heritage discourse in contemporary British engagements with Greece. It then analyzes Thomas Hardy’s poem “Christmas in the Elgin Room,” which scales up the irony and the critique as it looks back from the early twentieth century to the nineteenth-century acquisition of Lord Elgin’s collection. The result of the universalism that accumulates ancient Greek antiquities in the British Museum, Hardy shows, is not preservation but dislocation and tragedy – a disillusionment that threatens the stability of British heritage discourse.

This chapter studies two contrasting models for predictive thinking and representation in Thomas Hardy. In The Return of the Native (1878), Hardy’s depiction of repetitive phenomena evokes one renovated account of logico-mathematical probability, John Venn’s empirical theory about how we judge from series of instances. In the novel’s palpably antiquated rural setting – where characters intuit more than they see, gamble by the light of glowworms, and infer human plots from long-run traces in the material world – the abstractions of Victorian logic acquire concrete form. In The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), by contrast, serial iterations are compressed into images. Hardy designs literary equivalents of Francis Galton’s “composite photographs,” used to model statistical data and mental processes. Characters think in overlays, detecting a parent’s face playing over that of a child, designing a future self by laying transparencies over the present, and imagining human plots as grids from overhead. Serial and composite thinking extend to Hardy’s “approximative” theory of fiction. He uses these tropes as an implicit riposte to critics and advocates for a novelistic realism tolerant of repetition, coincidence, and improbability.

Chapter 4 examines Naipaul’s engagement with the legacy of slavery beginning with The Loss of El Dorado (1969), a remarkable example of a novelistic rendition of historical events based on Naipaul’s reading of nightmarish primary documents relating to the colonization of the West Indies and littoral Latin America. What surfaced in the creative history that he wrote is a narrative of failures and failed, egotistical heroes, and administrators who, living out their own fantasies, saw nothing aberrant in their treatment of the slaves they traumatized and condemned, and the Indians they dispossessed and then killed off. Before The Loss of El Dorado, Naipaul had written his first travel book, The Middle Passage (1962), also discussed in this chapter. Naipaul returns to the theme twenty-five years later in A Way in the World (1994). The chapter examines the disturbing novel Guerrillas (1975), a dark book about fantasy-driven Black Power enthusiasts and, given the historical connections between Spanish and English slavery, a work on the American South, A Turn in the South (1989). The chapter makes the case that to Naipaul nations fail when they do not fully come to terms with their history.

This chapter follows a cue from Jacques Lacan in considering the antinomy of nonsense and onomatopoeia. With Edward Lear at its centre, the chapter discusses the violence against the animal and the species melancholy that characterize nonsense writing. Also treated are Christine Rossetti’s Sing-Song and animal poems by Thomas Hardy.

This chapter defines a genre of lyric whose speaker is a personification of an entire species. Lyrics of this kind appear in poetic field guides in the 1830s, and in poetry for children throughout the century. The chapter closes with readings of lyrics by Swinburne and Hardy in which the conditions under which a species can become a speaking subject are opened to critique

When Clare Leighton (1898–1989) engraved illustrations for her 1929 edition of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1872), she said: “I was Egdon Heath, feeling the hooves of the cropper ponies and the turn of the undergrowth.” She was this land, that road, those flowers. She was precisely in the place of Hardy’s book, embracing the layering of the fictional and real that her act of creation entailed. The passage of time and the trauma of World War I might have suggested a need for nostalgia, but Leighton’s images of a prewar, preindustrial landscape were very much rooted in the present. She took Hardy’s England as a telescope into a rural, land-based life that she further explored in her accounts of creating a working garden and farm, Four Hedges (1935) and Country Matters (1937). Of particular interest is the way that she treated her full-sized illustrations, which were narrative and text-based, and her head- and tailpieces, which were more observational. The alchemy of these two kinds of images mimicked Hardy’s plotting, which also oscillated between character and landscape.

This chapter positions Thomas Hardy, and to a lesser extent his Wiltshire-born contemporary, Richard Jefferies, as case studies by which to assess broader environmental crises in the final decades of the nineteenth century. My central concern is with how the georgic sensibility, far from a passé or patrician enthusiasm in late-Victorian literature, has, in Hardy’s view, great analytical power and relevance. It allows him – especially in The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Woodlanders – to probe moral attitudes towards, and economic theories about, manual toil in an age of capitalist accumulation. In these novels Hardy interprets georgic motifs, values and sources through his portrayal of the pugnacious ‘corn king’ Henchard and the introverted yeoman Winterborne, respectively. In both texts, I contend, Hardy documents an indigenous land-worker’s increasingly fraught dispute with, and gradual supplanting by, a more ruthlessly hard-headed arriviste.

The introduction opens with a reading of a passage from a 1914 letter by D. H. Lawrence to establish three major facets of the book’s argument: (1) for many modernists, cross-sex collaboration offered a practical way of using gender difference as a source of creative energy; (2) both Lawrence and many of his contemporaries viewed shared creative activity between women and men as deeply and positively subversive; and (3) rather than envisioning cross-sex collaboration as a harmonious synthesis of opposites, Lawrence revels in the prospect of its leading to unresolvable gender conflict. It then introduces my concept of the discord aesthetic, which refers to the modernists’ tendency to use conflict between the sexes as a creative catalyst and infuse the texts they made together with evidence of that conflict; situates my argument with respect to prior scholarship on the intersections between modernism, gender, and literary couplings; and acknowledges my debt to the textual scholarship methodology of reading the linguistic and material dimensions of texts as working together to create meaning.

This chapter places Thomas Hardy’s writings in the context of the heated arguments that arose between Charles Darwin and his most outspoken adversary, the philologist Max Müller, regarding the relationship between language and thought. While Müller insisted on a close, coeval relationship between the ability to frame ideas and the ability to express those ideas in words, Darwin throughout his writing demonstrates a lively fascination with the diverse and dynamic kinds of thinking that human beings and other animals appear able to perform ‘manifestly without the aid of language’ (Descent of Man, 1871). This chapter argues that Hardy’s writing is centrally concerned with the tragi-comic consequences of a world in which there is both language without thought and thought without language. It begins by exploring Hardy’s responses to these larger concerns in his novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891-2) and concludes by examining his return to this theme in his poetry. The chapter discusses a wide range of Hardy’s poems, from canonical pieces such as ‘The Darkling Thrush’ (1900) to lesser-known works, including the series of short poems that Hardy is believed to have contributed to his second wife Florence Emily Dugdale’s volume for children, The Book of Baby Birds (1912).

Chapter 3, “Hardy and the Vanity of Procreation,” begins by noting that the notorious infanticide-suicide in Jude the Obscure has always posed a riddle for critics: laboring to make sense of it, they often treat it as an aberration in Thomas Hardy’s work. This chapter takes a different view. Father Time’s grotesque flourish is not simply a piece of Malthusianism, or an affront to the Victorian reader, but rather a kind of culmination of Hardy’s career-long struggle to integrate procreation, the fulfillment of creating new life, into his fiction and poetry. In Hardy’s novels reproduction is nearly always thwarted or suspended: this is consistent with his many expressions of distaste, throughout his verse and private writings, for the ongoingness of new life. Like Schopenhauer (whom he read), Hardy suggests that creating new persons is a kind of aesthetic-moral error. This chapter asks how the novel – a form of art usually considered dynamic, vital, and vibrant – can accommodate such a challenge to its very foundations.

Thomas Hardy was the first poet that Seamus Heaney discovered in his boyhood in Mossbawn, where poems set to memory and scenes from the novels began to shape an earth-rooted poetic in which he envisioned the poet as Antaeus and the poem as a ploughshare turning over ancestral ghosts and disappearing objects for the poetic reconstitution of a vanishing 'country of the mind'. When he eventually discovered Yeats, Eliot and other modern poets indifferent to Hardy, he saw their modern visionary and intellectual poetics as his Hercules, writing in 'Antaeus and Hercules' of their threat to his earthbound poetics as 'pap for the dispossessed'. Heaney’s full engagement with the moderns was accompanied by regular retreats into his Hardy haven and identification with Kavanagh, Auden, Larkin and others sympathetic to the Hardy tradition. The Antaeus-Hercules conflict was not to become a feared defeat but a liberating reconciliation borne of his study of the Hardy-Yeats-Eliot breakthroughs into the miraculous, discovering through them the balance of earth and lift essential to great poetry.

In Greek tragedies and in Hardy’s tragic novels, plots beyond our control destroy our good character, while we or others lament this injustice and envision events otherwise. In such moments of counter-narrative rebellion, both the impassioned narrator of Tess of the d’Urbervilles and the titular character of Jude the Obscure attack the logics of rape culture and victim-blaming that, in Greek tragic fashion, descend on their heroines from without and degrade them beyond recognition. This chapter contrasts Hardy’s theory of tragedy with the Aristotelian model of tragedy in which protagonists themselves inadvertently cause their demises. Hardy’s sense of tragedy is different, too, from the Christian model in which heroines fall because of their moral vices. Like Greek tragedies, Hardy’s novels show extrahuman and anthropogenic sources of suffering that cannot be justified. In particular, Hardy’s tragedy decries the notion of scapegoating, which understands the exile or elimination of the “other” to cleanse the community.

Chapter Seven marks a turn away from consideration of ways in which the material presence of the map bears upon authorial and readerly meaning-making, to ways in which the absence, or internalisation, of the map affects the reader’s engagement with the text. Literary mapping is unusual by comparison with maps in other disciplines, in that the question of why a map is not present, or is withheld, can be of as much interest as its presence. This chapter addresses a question that implicitly emerges from the earlier chapters: why do maps occur so frequently in popular genres but extremely infrequently in canonical texts (especially the realist novel)? After exploring this issue through debates around realism and representation in France and Britain, the chapter considers two rare canonical authors who do use maps in relation to the realist novel: Trollope and Hardy. (141)

This chapter examines the antagonistic relationship with Nietzsche’s Greeks that was managed by one of the main writers of modernism, D. H. Lawrence. By thinking about the position of Nietzsche in the British intellectual climate of the early twentieth century, and in particular his association to the anti-Germanic feeling surrounding the First World War, this chapter contextualises the tension between Lawrence’s antipathy towards Nietzsche and the clear resonances between the two authors’ attitudes towards the irrational nature of ancient Greece. The chapter examines the differing attitudes towards tragedy that Lawrence puts forward across his voluminous writings, including especially his 1920 novel Women in Love, his critical-theoretical essay ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ (written 1914/1915, published posthumously in 1946), and his travel writings about his visits to Etruscan tombs. It uses the idea of the ‘gay science’, which Lawrence took from Nietzsche’s work of the same name from 1882, to situate Lawrence’s desire to establish an anti-tragic form of art and literature with a genealogy that stretches back to antiquity.

This chapter argues that the British 1880s sees the emergence of powerful forces of political idealism, sceptical of evangelical calls to religious salvation but offering, instead, uplifting forms of ‘discursive Christianity’ in which high-minded routes to social salvation draw on Christian ideals but are modified to address the social problems of the day. The play of such a diffused Christianity is examined in the fiction of William Hale White (‘Mark Rutherford’). It then examines how George Gissing, with his commitment to realism in the novel, faces the aesthetic challenge of representing, authentically, political idealism, as expressed through polemic and forms of speech-making. Gissing’s solution is an ‘impersonal’ mode of presentation and an increasingly satiric treatment of vocal performance. Gissing’s scepticism about the limits of oratorical performance is seen as symptomatic of a wider artistic disenchantment with the strategies of Victorian high-mindedness, as in the satiric proto-modernism of late Hardy. In the light of the modernist diffusion of aesthetic and cultural detachment from the ethical and political imperatives of late-Victorianism into the inter-war period, it falls to later twentieth-century criticism to re-start serious evaluation of the innovatory character of the interplay of social, political and aesthetic life in the British 1880s.

This chapter explores intersections between animals produced for human consumption, liberal inclusion, and biopolitics, another strategy of governmentality. I first examine mid-century cattle industry reform and concerns over the treatment of animals raised for human consumption. By embracing notions of animal capital and profit to better regulate animal lives, animal welfare discourse showed how animal bodies can negatively or positively affect the wealth of the nation, depending on their treatment. I contrast this biopolitical discourse with Thomas Hardy’s concerns over the treatment of cattle, and his desire for animal justice and equality. After examining his own animal welfare, especially concerns about the cattle industry, I analyze his novel about shepherding and pastoral power, Far from the Madding Crowd, which employs what I call an affirmative biopolitical realism. Through focusing on the lives of sheep and enhancing them with his biopolitical realist techniques, Hardy offers an alternative ethic for relating with animals that values animals outside capitalist discourses of profit, ultimately positing a liberal inclusion that welcomes animals.