A Tragedy Of Nature--Nature In The Return Of The Native

Nature, the sustainer of all lives, has never been absent in English literary works, but in works of different historical periods or of different writers, the role of Nature varies. In Romantic poems, Nature is the source of the poet's ideas and feelings; in English traditional novels, Nature mainly acts as background; in modernist literature, Nature is often connected with human instinct. However, in the major fiction by Thomas Hardy, a transitional writer of the period between English traditional literature and modern literature, Nature plays a dominant role: Nature foreshadows the tragic ending of the story, and it is the agent of the development of the plot and even the real character of some novels.This paper elaborates Nature in Hardy's major novels and puts special emphasis on the landscape in The Return of the Native, demonstrating the work as a novel of Nature. Then, the paper goes further to probe Hardy's view of Nature. At last it discusses the influence of Hardy's treatment of Nature on English modernist literature, especially on Naturalists. In this way the paper aims at looking at Hardy's fiction from a new perspective of Nature and gaining better understanding of Hardy's status in English literary history.