مشخصات پژوهش

The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) is one of the most interesting tragic novels in the English realist tradition, in that it is set in the public life of a provincial town, rather than in the private life of a single individual and is a prolonged moral and psychological catastrophe. This study is needed because it provides a detailed, text-based account of Henchard's fall, in a tightly structured way, of the inevitability and humanity of it. A novel that is often discussed in terms of destiny, but destiny is not necessarily defined in the ways in which the plot operates: disclosure, coincidence, incongruity, public embarrassment and frequent contrast between mood and setting. The more that these processes can be explained the more it will be understood why The Mayor of Casterbridge is one of Hardy's most interesting tragedies. There are three key implications of the study. First, it is helpful in Hardy criticism because it helps to explain the connection between character and catastrophe in a novel where the moral failing of the principal character cannot be divorced from the social context. Second, it provides a more accurate insight into the way a realist novel gives the impression of a tragic necessity without the use of supernatural determinism. Thirdly, it is a useful method for reading in the nineteenth-century novel of tragedy, especially when the protagonist is not beset by a single heroic flaw, but his downfall is a gradual process of choices, reversals, and public consequences.