SOURCE: Siebenschuh, William R. “Hardy and the Imagery of Place.” Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900 39, no. 4 (autumn 1999): 773-89.

In the following essay, Siebenschuh suggests that Hardy's poetic and fictional vision is closely tied to his symbolic use of the sense of place.

In the text that follows, I make two assumptions about the nature of Thomas Hardy's fiction and poetry in general, both of which were articulated years ago by John Holloway in The Victorian Sage and both of which have been echoed many times since. The first is that though one looks in vain for a coherent general philosophy in Hardy's works, it is clear that he does have something like a coherent imaginative vision, a consistent set of ways of viewing and presenting the world. The second assumption is that this larger vision is seldom, if ever, effectively expressed in abstract terms. What Holloway calls Hardy's...