TEXTS
1979 Caryl Churchill, Cloud 9
1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran; the Shah
flees. Soviets invade Afghanistan 1979-90 Margaret Thatcher is British prime minister
1980 J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the
1980-88 Iran-Iraq War
Barbarians
1981 Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children. Brian Friel, Translations 1982 Falklands War 1985 Production of Hanif Kureishi's My
Beautiful Laundrette
1988 Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall. Tiananmen
1989 Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the
Square, Beijing, demonstration and massacre
Day
1990 Derek Walcott, Omeros 1991 Collapse of the Soviet Union 1992 Thorn Gunn, The Man with Night Sweats
1993 Tom Stoppard, Arcadia 1994 Democracy comes to South Africa 1997 Arundhati Roy, The God of Small
1997 Labour Party victory in the U.K.
ends eighteen years of Conservative
government 1998 British handover of Hong Kong to China. Northern Ireland Assembly established
1999 Carol Ann Duffy, The World's Wife
Things
2000 Zadie Smith, White Teeth 2001 September 11 attacks destroy World Trade Center 2002 Paul Muldoon, Moy Sand and
2002 Euro becomes sole currency in most
of European Union 2003 Invasion of Iraq led by U.S. and
Gravel
U.K. 1850
.
1851
THOMAS HARDY 1840-1928
Thomas Hardy was born near Dorchester, in that area of southwest England that he was to make the 'Wessex' of his novels. He attended local schools until the age of fifteen, when he was apprenticed to a Dorchester architect with whom he worked for six years. In 1861 he went to London to continue his studies and to practice as an architect. Meanwhile he was completing his general education informally through his own erratic reading and was becoming more and more interested in both fiction and poetry. After some early attempts at writing both short stories and poems, he decided to concentrate on fiction. His first novel was rejected by the publishers in 1868 on the recommendation of George Meredith, who nevertheless advised Hardy to write another. The result was Desperate Remedies, published anonymously in 1871, followed the next year by his first real success (also published anonymously), Under the Greenwood Tree. His career as a novelist was now well launched; Hardy gave up his architectural work and produced a series of novels that ended with Jude the Obscure in 1895. The hostile reception of this novel?lambasted as Jude the Obscene?sent him back to poetry. Straddling the Victorian and modern periods, he published all his novels in the nineteenth century, all but the first of his poetry collections, Wessex and Other Verses (1898), in the twentieth. His remarkable epic-drama of the Napoleonic Wars, The Dynasts, came out in three parts between 1903 and
1908; after this he wrote mostly lyric poetry.
Hardy's novels, set in a predominantly rural 'Wessex,' show the forces of nature outside and inside individuals combining to shape human destiny. Against a background of immemorial agricultural labor, with ancient monuments such as Stonehenge or an old Roman amphitheater reminding us of the human past, he presents characters at the mercy of their own passions or finding temporary salvation in the age-old rhythms of rural work or rural recreation. Men and women in Hardy's fiction are not masters of their fates; they are at the mercy of the indifferent forces that manipulate their behavior and their relations with others, but they can achieve dignity through endurance, heroism, or simple strength of character. The characteristic Victorian novelist?e.g., Dickens or Thackeray?was concerned with the behavior and problems of people in a given social milieu, which were described in detail; Hardy preferred to go directly for the elemental in human behavior with a minimum of contemporary social detail. Most of his novels are tragic, exploring the bitter ironies of life with an almost malevolent staging of coincidence to emphasize the disparity between human desire and ambition on the one hand and what fate has in store for the characters on the other. But fate is not a wholly external force. Men and women are driven by the demands of their own nature as much as by anything outside them. Perhaps the darkest of Hardy's novels, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) is the story of an intelligent and sensitive young woman, daughter of a poor family, driven to murder and so to death by hanging, by a painfully ironic concatenation of events and circumstances. Published in the same year as Tess, the story anthologized here, 'On the Western Circuit,' similarly has at its center a young country woman seduced by a sophisticated city man; her 'ruin' (see also Hardy's poem 'The Buined Maid') leads? contrary to the good intentions of the three protagonists, and again as the result of bitter irony?to his ruin and a lifetime of misery for all concerned.
