Narrative Innovations in Thomas Hardy’s Novels
Narrative Innovations in Thomas Hardy’s Novels

Summary/Abstract: This survey is an attempt at invalidating, at least partially, the idea that Thomas Hardy is a writer subject to the tradition of the 18th-century novel. While there are reasons to support this idea, it is also true that the Victorian novelist’s narrative strategies anticipate, to a certain degree, the modernist authors’ concerns and stylistic devices. It is these narrative techniques that this article will be focused on. The first part of the survey will provide readers with a theoretical and historical introduction which will include the definitions of showing and telling and a historical account of the segments of reality that various generations of writers were interested in. This is meant as a theoretical and historical background that is needed for the proper understanding of Hardy’s narrative specificity. The second part contains a few analyses of certain excerpts from three of Thomas Hardy’s novels based on which I try to support the novelist’s pre-modernist dimension.

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