Setting as Protagonist in Thomas Hardy’s Fiction: A Study of The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Abstract

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is considered as one of the most important English novelists, short story writers and poets of the Naturalist movement of the Victorian age. Many critics see him as a transitional writer whose art echoes the tradition of nineteenth-century fiction and paves the way for the advance of Modernism. This thesis aims at studying and analyzing setting as protagonist in Thomas Hardy’s novels: The Return of the Native(1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge(1886) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles(1891). The fact that Thomas Hardy’s setting is the central and most dominant narrative element in his fiction, and that all the other elements are shaped and coloured by Hardy’s own vision of the setting, has stimulated the writer of this thesis to make a study and analysis of the centrality of the setting in his novels, particularly that this is a point that has not been dealt with or investigated before, though some critics have felt it and alluded to it in bits and pieces, but no thorough or detailed study has ever been made of it before. The writer of this thesis deals with Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the D’Urbervilles. These three novels have been regarded by critics as being among the most outstanding and popular of the works of Thomas Hardy. Also, these specific three novels can be used to reveal and investigate setting as protagonist in Hardy’s fiction.