Posted: February 23rd, 2015

Thomas Hardy, The Returen of the Native

Thomas Hardy, The Returen of the Native

Answer some questions about Hardy’s Novel. Here are the questions. 1. In Thomas Hardy’s “The Return of the Native,” characters are inextricably linked to the surrounding natural world and the professions associated with the landscape. In his essay, “Faciality and Sensation in Hardy’s Return of the Native,” William A. Cohen writes: “Third, Hardy suggests that these perceptually permeable bodies are contiguous with the natural world, that landscape is in turn a percipient body, and that the two bodies are in a mutually constitutive relation. By animating landscape, and at the same time, showing the porousness of human beings to nonhuman entities, Hardy erodes distinctions between subjects and objects” (440). In what ways does Hardy erode this distinction between landscape and man, and what does it accomplish textually? And possibly, how do aspects of Darwinism inform or not inform Hardy’s narration and treatment of his characters? PLEASE DO NOT write any introduction about the book start the paper with your answers.