Part 1 of Essay
Thomas Hardy is probably known as a novelist, which is how he established himself from 1871 to 1896. He is associated with the English county of Dorset, which he fictionalized into "Wessex". He wrote Far From the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, and Jude the Obscure, for example. But Hardy's view of fate (which wa ....

Part 2 of Essay
.... terms: Jude the Obscure is Hardy's most distinctly 'modern' work, for it rests upon a cluster of assumptions central to modernist literature: that in our time men wishing to be more than dumb clods must live in permanent doubt and intellectual crisis; that for such men, to whom traditional beliefs are no longer available, life has become inherently problematic …and that courage, if it is to be found at all, consists in readiness to accept pain while refusing the comforts of certainty. This was ba ....