Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Unorthodox Beauty
Unknown Author
1992
First Published
4.67
Average Rating
123
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Thomas Hardy, one of England's leading novelists from the mid-1870s to the late 1890s, was recognized widely before his death in 1928 as the most important English man of letters of his time. Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), generally acclaimed as the best of Hardy's Wessex Novels, continues to fascinate readers and critics alike. Admired now for its language and humanity, it was deplored in some quarters in the 1890s for its candor about sexual matters and its philosophical pessimism. Hardy's story of the rape, excruciating suffering, and execution of a beautiful village maid—as passionate in condemnation of the forces that persecute her as in depiction of the strange beauty that accompanies her agonies—is one of the masterpieces of world fiction. In this volume on Tess Peter J. Casagrande submits that in the creation of Tess Durbeyfield Hardy is less involved in telling a moral tale than he is engaged in paradoxical play on the commingling of beauty and ugliness, a fusion for which Casagrande coins the term "beaugliness," or "the beaugly." Convincingly arguing that the means Hardy used to make Tess shockingly new for readers in the 1890s rests on his depiction of the beaugly in an always beautiful, often aggressive, at times murderously violent heroine, Casagrande suggests that Hardy subordinates the moral issues inherent in the narrative of sexual ruin to aesthetic issues, particularly the issue of the beauty to be found in a person or action conventionally regarded as ugly. Chapters on the historical context of Tess and on the critical reception of the novel place Casagrande's reading within the milieu of certain nineteenth century social and political concerns, as well as the history of criticism on Tess from the early 1890s to the present. In addition to his analysis of the unorthodox beauty of Tess, Casagrande offers a new view of Angel Clare, an important, in many ways neglected figure in the novel. This full critical reading of Tess is a most welcom
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