ABSTRACT
Sue and Jude are typical ‘Shelleyans’ in Hardy’s fictional scheme not so much because they harbour a zealous desire for revolt and renovation, but because they are variously enthralled within cycles of pernicious illusion that evade or negate altogether the concreteness of genuine engagements with humanity. Jocelyn Pierston is the most extreme of Hardy’s Shelleyan figures because, in the 1897 text, the sculptor’s aggressively practical projects will effectively devastate a corner of Wessex replete with precious anthropological data. Hardy’s sceptical intertextual dialogue with sentimental and idealistic forms of Romanticism culminates in the notoriously bizarre generic experiment The Well-Beloved, technically Hardy’s final published novel. In The Well-Beloved’s alternative endings Hardy not only reflects on many of his preceding novels but also administers the last rites to his extraordinary fiction-writing career. Scholars continue to treat the novel unfavourably, but it offers Hardy’s most compelling diagnostic comment on the pathology of the tendency towards apotheosis in art and love.
