English Literature Coursework - Thomas Hardy - Setting

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English Literature Coursework

The three stories I will be comparing in my coursework are “The Withered Arm”, “The Winters & the Palmleys” and “The thieves who couldn’t help sneezing”. 

Hardy’s has expertise of a writer and poet of Victorian literature. Victorian literature is the literature produced during 1837—1901 and corresponds to the Victorian era. It forms a link and transition between the writers of the romantic period and the very different literature of the 20th century. Thomas Hardy was an English novelist, short story writer, and poet of the naturalist movement. The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-imaginary county of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy's poetry, first published in his fifties, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after the 1960s Movement! Life in rural Dorset and the surrounding counties that make up Thomas Hardy's "Wessex of the novels and poems" moved more slowly than in metropolis of London or the industrial north, so that a novel may seem to be set much earlier than it actually is. Hardy's handling of physical setting is unparallel in English fiction, although in the verse of the Lake Poets and Robert Burns one has a similar sense of a specific topography and landscape. But, when Hardy is at his best, as in The Return of the Native, the natural backdrop becomes another person in the picture, so to speak. Egdon Heath is not described sop frequently and in such detail merely for the sake of "local colour." Indeed, such rural settings were outside the range of experience of the primarily urban readership To a certain extent, the world of Hardy's peasantry is timeless; their lives determined by the natural rhythms of planting and harvest rather than by clocks and railway timetables, so that the movement of most Hardy narratives is through seasons rather than through months. Hardy's Wessex is generally pre-industrial and agricultural, its society close-knit and traditional.

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         Hardy introduces setting at the opening line of each story, to create a motif, “Many years ago” and “It was an eighty cow diary”. This reveals that setting is obviously integral to the development of both stories. The withered arm is a very rural scene while the thieves who could help sneezing is an forest type theme

In the Thieves who couldn’t Help Sneezing, Hardy uses personification to intrigue the reader,” Were about as large as elderly gentlemen’s walking sticks”. This literary technique gives the audience a visual aid of the scene, challenging them to be ...

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