ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-Century Britain and Beyond By the form and content of this text I have tried to express my best understanding of how Hardy made sense of life in the universe and how he subsequently expressed that understanding within the form and content of his novels. It will always be impossible to identify and retrace exactly all of the pathways that Hardy’s mind took to reach the syntheses of ideas he achieved in his fiction. The primary texts of the literary history of astronomy provide us with a list of the usual suspects that we can check against extant evidence in Hardy’s fiction and nonfiction, letters and notebooks, literary references and allusions, stylistic modeling and echoes. As we saw in the opening chapters, such a process helps us map Hardy’s participation in the long tradition of human writing about the cosmos, from archaeological artifacts to mythopoetic, classical and Biblical accounts, to narratives of anthropology and folklore, and the great works of western literature (past and contemporary). Likewise, revisiting significant primary texts of natural philosophy, the history of astronomy and cosmology, and natural history, we are able to suggest how their influences may have flowed into Hardy’s consciousness through an eclectic variety of intellectual watersheds and tributaries.
