Emotion and Character in the Early Fiction of Thomas Hardy

Abstract

Recent decades have witnessed the increasing popularity of cognitive literary criticism and the emotion studies. This thesis seeks to contribute to these growing fields by studying Hardy’s novel Far From the Madding Crowd alongside a contemporary study of character published a decade earlier. In this thesis I will first give a brief account of the concept of the human mind in the nineteenth century, acknowledging the wider historical perspective. Next, I will recover a contemporary theory of mind—Alexander Bain’s psychological treatment of character—which will be used as a critical tool when analysing Far From the Madding Crowd. One question that will particularly concern this thesis is whether character development is possible in a context that increasingly emphasised a determinist view of human nature.