Abstract
It seems appropriate, in the present surroundings, to begin with a text, or, more extravagantly, with two texts. The first is brief and comes from an entry in Hardy’s autobiography for 29 January 1890: ‘I have beeo looking for God for 50 years, and I think if he had existed, I should have discovered him. As an external personality, of course, the only true meaning of the word.’ The tone is reminiscent of that of a detective wearied in search of a missing person — confident in the nature of his search, robustly honest in recording the bleakness of its outcome.
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Notes
Thomas Hardy, The Life and Works of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (London, 1984) p. 406.
Ian Gregor, ‘What Kind of Fiction Did Hardy Write?’, Essays in Criticism, 16 (1966) 290–308.
David de Laura, ‘“The Ache of Modernism” in Hardy’s Later Novels’, ELH, 34 (1967) 380–99.
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Library Edition (London, 1949) p. 134.
D. H. Lawrence, ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’, in Anthony Beal (ed.), Selected Literary Criticism (London, 1967) p. 198.
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, Papermac (London, 1966) p. 16.
John Coulson, Religion and Imagination:‘In Aid of a Grammar of Assent’ (Oxford, 1981) p. 103.
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© 1986 David Jasper
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Gregor, I. (1986). Contrary Imaginings: Thomas Hardy and Religion. In: Jasper, D. (eds) The Interpretation of Belief. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18333-3_13
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