Handout hardy
Handout: "On the Western Circuit" (1891)
Realism
[...] realistic fiction is written to give the effect that it represents life and the social world as it seems to the common reader, evoking the sense that its characters might in fact exist and that such things might well happen. To achieve such effects, the novelists we identify as realists may or may not be selective in subject matter—although most of them prefer the commonplace and the everyday, represented in minute detail, over rarer aspects of life—but they must render their materials in ways that make them seem to their readers the very stuff of ordinary experience. For example, Daniel Defoe in the early eighteenth century dealt with the extraordinary adventures of a shipwrecked mariner named Robinson Crusoe and with the extraordinary misadventures of a woman named Moll Flanders; but he made his novels seem to readers a mirror held up to reality by his reportorial manner of rendering all the events, whether ordinary or extraordinary, in the same circumstantial, matter-of-fact, and seemingly unselective way. Both the fictions of Franz Kafka and the present-day novels of magic realism achieve their effects in large part by exploiting a realistic manner in rendering events that are in themselves fantastic, absurd, or flatly impossible.
Naturalism
[A form of realism that holds] that a human being exists entirely in the order of nature and does not have a soul nor any access to a religious or spiritual world beyond the natural world; and therefore, that such a being is merely a higher-order animal whose character and behavior are entirely determined by two kinds of forces: heredity and environment. Each person inherits compulsive instincts—especially hunger, the drive to accumulate possessions, and sexuality—and is then subjected to the social and economic forces in the family, the class, and the milieu into which that person is born.
[Naturalistic writers] tend to choose characters who exhibit strong animal drives such as greed and sexual desire, and who are helpless victims both of glandular secretions within and of sociological pressures without. The end of the naturalistic novel is usually "tragic," but not, as in classical and Elizabethan tragedy, because of a heroic but losing struggle of the individual mind and will against gods, enemies, and circumstances. Instead the protagonist of the naturalistic plot, a pawn to multiple compulsions, usually disintegrates or is wiped out.
Aspects of the naturalistic selection and management of subject matter and its austere or harsh manner of rendering its materials are apparent in many modern novels and dramas, such as Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895) (although Hardy largely substituted a cosmic determinism for biological and environmental determinism).
Governing Metaphor
Definition: A metaphor that extends throughout an entire literary work, providing the central conceptual framework for understanding the whole piece.
Unlike a simple metaphor (one comparison) or extended metaphor (several related comparisons), a governing metaphor organizes and unifies the entire text from beginning to end. It provides the main organizing principle for meaning and shapes how readers interpret all events, characters, and themes. Other images and symbols relate back to this central comparison, creating thematic unity and coherence.
Example: Shakespeare's Othello (c. 1603)
The governing metaphor of poison/disease spreading through the body controls the entire tragedy. Iago "pours pestilence" into Othello's ear, and jealousy spreads like an infection throughout the play. The marriage bed becomes "contaminated" and must be "purified" through murder. Each act shows this moral disease spreading further, until the final scene reveals the complete corruption of all relationships.
Free Indirect Discourse
[...] the reports of what a character says and thinks shift in pronouns, adverbs, tense, and grammatical mode, as we move—or sometimes hover—between the direct narrated representation of these events as they occur to the character and the indirect representation of such events by the narrator of the story. Thus, a direct representation, “He thought, ‘I will see her home now, and may then stop at my mother’s,’ ” might shift, in an“indirect representation,” to “He thought that he would see her home and then maybe stop at his mother’s.”
Example from Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811):
Mrs John Dashwood did not at all approve of what her husband intended to do for his sisters. To take three thousand pounds from the fortune of their dear little boy, would be impoverishing him to the most dreadful degree. She begged him to think again on the subject. How could he answer it to himself to rob his child, and his only child too, of so large a sum?
References
M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms (11th edition)