Issue |
SHS Web Conf.
Volume 199, 2024
2024 International Conference on Language Research and Communication (ICLRC 2024)
|
|
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Article Number | 04035 | |
Number of page(s) | 6 | |
Section | Literature and Culture | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/202419904035 | |
Published online | 23 October 2024 |
Prometheus in the Guise of Pessimism: The Tinder of Hope that Thomas Hardy Brought to his Audience at the End of the 19th Century
Wenzhou-Kean University, 88 Daxue Road, Ouhai District, Wenzhou, Zhejiang, China
* Corresponding author: tuhu@kean.edu
This paper is devoted to the substantive significance of Hardy's pessimism, mainly based on Thomas Hardy's poems and novels written in the late 19th century. Although pessimism has been recognized as an essential feature of Thomas Hardy's literary career as a novelist and poet, he refuses to admit to being a pessimist, instead enabling the use of pessimism as the first step in exploring reality and improving the soul and body of human beings. Through a dialectical reading of Hardy's works, this paper will further analyze the specific audience groups targeted by Hardy's pessimism and the extraordinary positive impact it brought to this group at the turn of the century and during the period of social change; compare it with the literature of other culture to deconstruct the contradictions of this pessimism and extract its unique value. In addition, this paper will introduce Hardy’s precise prediction of the future movement, which can demonstrate the unique value of literature compared to political and quasi-scientific discourse.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2024
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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