Lawrence’s Hardy and Dyer’s Lawrence: Heritage as Reflexive Self-engagement and Self-authorisation in Fiction and Criticism
Lawrence’s Study of Thomas Hardy and Dyer’s writings on Lawrence are addressed as sites for reflexive critical engagement with the authority of fiction. Each author uses their subject as an occasion for critical self-engagement with their own sense of critical authority, thereby suggesting an intere...
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| Опубликовано в: : | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/fathom, |
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| Главный автор: | |
| Формат: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Язык: | Anglais |
| Опубликовано: |
FATHOM
2026
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| Предметы: | |
| Online-ссылка: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Итог: | Lawrence’s Study of Thomas Hardy and Dyer’s writings on Lawrence are addressed as sites for reflexive critical engagement with the authority of fiction. Each author uses their subject as an occasion for critical self-engagement with their own sense of critical authority, thereby suggesting an interesting critical epistemological heritage which Lawrence develops from Hardy and Dyer seeks to consolidate from Lawrence. Lawrence compares Hardy to Sophocles and Shakespeare in setting the sense of morality grasped by human consciousness within the greater, incomprehensible morality of nature, which surpasses it and whose tragic heroes are brought down by challenging it. Hardy is attempting to discharge the novelist’s artistic responsibility to ensure that their metaphysic - the ontology realised through narrative and characterisation in their fiction - subserves the novel’s artistic purpose beyond their intended aim. Yet Hardy’s tragic heroes are brought down by transgressing merely the social code of human government and morality, as if that determined their fate. Dyer sees Lawrence’s analysis of Hardy’s failure in this respect as providing for a looser relation between criticism and fiction and a basis for addressing Lawrence’s continuing literary significance in terms of his non-fictional writing, thereby questioning the contemporary relevance of the novel in favour of other literary forms. |
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