Abstract
Hardy was still smarting from the general execration of Jude the Obscure when he wrote a ‘Postscript’ to his original Preface, for the novel’s 1912 edition. His apologia explained that the marriage theme had ‘seemed a good foundation for the fable of a tragedy’ and that he was ‘not without a hope that certain cathartic, Aristotelian qualities might be found therein’. His gentle boast may be seen not only as a defiance of the reviewers but also as a pleased acceptance of those admirers who were beginning to hail him as a great tragic novelist.
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Notes
Quotations from his poems are taken from The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976).
William Van O’Connor, Climates of Tragedy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1943) p. 3.
See also J. W. Krutch, ‘The Tragic Fallacy’, in The Modern Temper (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929) pp. 115–43.
Murray Krieger argues that in an age which comes after thinkers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche there is room only for a ‘formless’ tragedy, which can best be accommodated in the novel: The Tragic Vision: Variations on a Theme in Literary Interpretation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
quoted from Harold Orel (ed.), Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1966; London: Macmillan, 1967) pp. 170–1
Dale Kramer, Thomas Hardy: The Forms of Tragedy (London: Macmillan Press, 1975) p. 35.
In Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (London: Macmillan, 1984) p. 265.
F. Kiefer, Fortune and Elizabethan Tragedy (San Marino, CA: Huntingdon, 1983)
H. R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927).
Maurice Willson Disher, Blood and Thunder: Mid-Victorian Melodrama and its Origins (London: Muller, 1949) pp. 12–13.
R. J. White, Thomas Hardy and History (London: Macmillan, 1974) p. 19.
C. Leech, Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1969) p. 84
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© 1998 Raymond Chapman
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Chapman, R. (1998). ‘The Worthy Encompassed by the Inevitable’: Hardy and a New Perception of Tragedy. In: Pettit, C.P.C. (eds) Reading Thomas Hardy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26657-9_6
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