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Besides, the end of the 19
th
century also created writers who were interested in human society as a
whole (B.Shaw, J.Galsworthy), and a new type of a writer who was preoccupied with the future of mankind
(Herbert Wells).
1.
Literary activity of Thomas Hardy. Depression and fatality in his works. His work «Tess of the
D’Urbervilles».
Thomas Hardy was born in southwestern England. His father, a skilled stone-mason, taught his son to
play violin and sent him to a country day school. At the age of fifteen Hardy began to study architecture,
and in 1861 he went to London to begin a career. There he tried poetry, then a career as an actor, and
finally decided to write fiction.
Hardy's home and the surrounding districts played an important role in his literary career. The region
was agricultural, and there were monuments of the past, which reminded of the prehistoric times.
First, Hardy aimed his fiction at serial publication in magazines,
where it would most quickly pay the bills. Not forgetting an earlier
dream, he resolved to keep his tales "as near to poetry in their
subject as the conditions would allow." His first success, "Far from
the Madding Crowd" (1874) was followed by "The Return of the
Native" (1878), "The Mayor of Casterbridge"(1885), and "Tess of the
D'Urbervilles" (1891). Hardy wrote about the Dorset country-side he
knew well and called it Wessex (the name of the Anglo-Saxon
kingdom once located there). He wrote about agrarian working
people, milkmaids, stonecutters, and shepherds.
Hardy's rejection of middle-class moral values disturbed and shocked some readers, but as time
passed, his novels gained in popularity and prestige. An architect by profession, he gave to his novels a
design that was architectural, employing each circumstance in the narrative to one accumulated effect. The
final impression was one of a malign. Fate functioning in men’s lives, corrupting their possibilities of
happiness, and beckoning them towards tragedy. While he saw life thus as cruel and purposeless, he does
not remain a detached spectator. He has pity for the puppets of Destiny, and it is a compassion that
extends from man to the earth-worm, and the diseased leaves of the tree. Such a conception gave his
novels a high seriousness which few of his contemporaries possessed.
No theory can in itself make a novelist, and Hardy’s novels, whether they are great or not have
appealed to successive generations of readers.
In 1874, he married and in 1885 built a remote country home in Dorset. From 1877 on, he spent
three to four months a year in a fashionable society, while the rest of the time he lived in the country. In
1895 his "Jude the Obscure" was so bitterly criticized, that Hardy decided to stop writing novels altogether
and returned to an earlier dream. In 1898, he published his first volume of poetry.
Over the next twenty-nine years, Hardy completed over 900 lyrics. His verse was independent of the
taste of his day.
Thomas Hardy has been called the last of the great Victorians. He died in 1928. His ashes are buried
in Westminster Abbey, but, because of his lasting relationship with his home district, his heart is buried in
Wessex. His position as a novelist is difficult to assess with any certainty. At first, he was condemned as a
"second-rate romantic", and in the year of his death he was elevated into one of the greatest figures of
English literature, the sincerity and courage and the successful patience of his art leave him a great figure in
English fiction. In the world war of 1914-18, he was read with pleasure as one who had the courage to
portray life with the grimness that was possessed and in portraying it not to lose pity.
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