ABSTRACT
Introduction Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy's fourth published novel, first appeared as a magazine serial in 1874. It remains one of Hardy's most popular novels, widely regarded as his first major success in fiction-writing. The fascination and appeal of the novel have much to do with its subtle blend of popular literary forms and its striking array of powerful visual images. We might begin by asking 'What kind of novel is Far from the Madding Crowd?' Is it a realist novel or is it some other mode of writing? Is it a pastoral tale, a comic romance or a Victorian melodrama, perhaps? Hardy has often been portrayed as a rather naive and unsophisticated writer of rural fiction, but this chapter takes a very different line and argues that his way of constructing fictional situations and events is highly complex and unusual. What constitutes realism for Hardy is not always easy to establish, partly because his writing often seems to question the very notion of realism, by drawing attention to its own fictional devices, and by incorporating stylistic tendencies - Gothic, sensationalist, melodramatic - that seem at odds with realist aims and ambitions. Much of this chapter is preoccupied with 'ways of seeing' - including the framing of events as if they were scenes from paintings - mainly because the role of vision in the novel exemplifies Hardy's serious and persistent concern with how the world might be represented in art. Reread chapter 1 of the novel (Hardy, [1874] 1998, pp.7-12; all subsequent page references are to this edition). How would you describe the narrative voice that we are introduced to here?
