Abstract
Virginia Woolf’s tribute to Thomas Hardy was written shortly after his death on January 11, 1928. In it she said: “if we are to place Hardy among his fellows, we must call him the greatest tragic writer among English novelists.” She goes on to assert that although it is “the most painful” and “pessimistic” of his novels, Jude the Obscure “is not tragic.”1 Hardy, himself, in the 1895 Preface to the First Edition of the novel referred to Jude as “simply an endeavor to give shape and coherence to a series of seemings, or personal impressions not of the first moment.”2 Superseding, however, is his later statement, which under the stimulus of the early critical attacks on Jude, identifies the novel’s central interest for him:
the greater part of the story — that which presented the shattered ideals of the two chief characters, and had been more especially, and indeed most exclusively, the part of interest to myself — practically ignored by the adverse press.3
All tragedy is grotesque. (Thomas Hardy, Life, August 13, 1898)
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© 1984 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Abdoo, S. (1984). Hardy’s Jude: The Pursuit of the Ideal as Tragedy. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Existential Coordinates of the Human Condition: Poetic — Epic — Tragic. Analecta Husserliana, vol 18. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6315-3_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6315-3_23
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