Space and its connection to characters in Thomas Hardy’s novels
| Thesis title in Czech: | Prostor a jeho provázání s postavami v románech Thomase Hardyho |
|---|---|
| Thesis title in English: | Space and its connection to characters in Thomas Hardy’s novels |
| Key words: | Thomas Hardy|space|literature|The Return of the Native|Tess of the d'Urbervilles|characters|environment|postavy|prostor |
| English key words: | Thomas Hardy|space|literature|characters|environment |
| Academic year of topic announcement: | 2017/2018 |
| Thesis type: | Bachelor's thesis |
| Thesis language: | angličtina |
| Department: | Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK) |
| Supervisor: | PhDr. Zdeněk Beran, Ph.D. |
| Author: | hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept. |
| Date of registration: | 19.02.2018 |
| Date of assignment: | 19.02.2018 |
| Administrator's approval: | not processed yet |
| Confirmed by Study dept. on: | 21.02.2018 |
| Date and time of defence: | 08.02.2022 00:00 |
| Date of electronic submission: | 17.01.2022 |
| Date of proceeded defence: | 08.02.2022 |
| Submitted/finalized: | committed by student and finalized |
| Opponents: | Mgr. Miroslava Horová, Ph.D. |
| Guidelines |
| When preparing the first edition of his collected works, Thomas Hardy included his major novels in a group called “Novels of Character and Environment”, which clearly indicates that he saw a fundamental link between people and the place they occupy. The Hardyesque “environment” can also be understood in terms of what French critics such as M. Blanchot or G. Bachellard call “literary space”. In my thesis I would like to explore connection between space, in this broader sense, and characters, and why the setting is of great importance to the story itself. For this purpose, I have chosen three novels by Thomas Hardy: Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Firstly, I would like to define literary space as a term, what role it plays in the process of reading, and how Hardy exploits its features in modelling his own specific space, the fictional Wessex. Further, I would like to examine Hardy’s concept of determinism and the role it plays in his novels, i.e. the form of social determinism that seems to lock characters in their fates, making it impossible for them to escape their social classes, the prejudices they stick to and the setting they are born (or borne) into, and how due to this concept of determinism some characters are destined to fail from the very beginning. |
| References |
| Primary sources: Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2012 Hardy, Thomas. Far from the Madding Crowd. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2012 Hardy, Thomas. The Return of the Native. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2012 Secondary sources: Andersen, Carol Reed. “Time, Space, and Perspective in Thomas Hardy.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 9, no. 3, 1954, pp. 192–208. JSTOR,www.jstor.org/stable/3044307. Bachelard, Gaston. The poetics of space, Boston: Beacon Press, 1994 Blanchot, Maurice. The space of literature, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989 Hodrová, Daniela. Poetika míst: Kapitoly z literární tematologie, Praha: H&H, 1997 Chattopadhyay, Amrita “Women in Victorian Society as Depicted in Thomas Hardy’s Novels.”International Journal of Educational Planning & Administration1, no. 1 (2011): 24, http://www.ripublication.com/ijepa/ijepav1n1_4.pdf Drabble, Margaret. The genius of Thomas Hardy. London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1976. Gregor, Ian. The great web: the form of Hardy's Major fiction. 1. Publ. London: Faber and Faber, 1974. Williams, Harold. “The Wessex Novels of Thomas Hardy.” The North American Review, vol. 199, no. 698, 1914, pp. 120–134. JSTOR,www.jstor.org/stable/25120154. |