An Interpretation Of Jude The Obscure From The Perspective Of Aristotle’s Poetics

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is an immortal British literary giant with a writing careerspanning two centuries. In his88-year history of life, he experienced two eras--aprecarious old world and a tough born new world. Jude the Obscure is his last novel, and ishighly controversial since the publication. However, as time goes on, it has provoked greatrepercussions by readers and literary critics through the entire world, and has beenrecognized as one of the most outstanding works of Thomas Hardy because of his uniquehandling and the interpretation of the tragic fate of the titular character, and mostimportantly the aesthetic values embodied in this novel.Thomas Hardy created a very tragic figure in Jude the Obscure--Jude, through whosedifficult life journey, mercilessly revealed how fragile and vulnerable it is when ordinarypeople revolt old system and the social environment.Aristotle’s Poetics is the first relatively complete monograph in aesthetics. In Poetics,he first has carried on the comprehensive discussion of tragedy, innovated the theory ofdrama on the basis of the ancient Greek tragedy theory and the theory of Plato, having aprofound impact on the development of tragedy theory.This paper studies the shocking tragedy of humanity in Jude the Obscure and analyzesthe plot development and character shaping and other aspects in-depth from the perspectiveofAristotle’s Poetics. The paper is divided into six parts:The first part is introduction which briefly introduces the author and work, theresearch status at home and abroad, and Aristotle’s theory of tragedy. The second part digsHardy’s creative concepts through the theoretical analysis on universality, integrity, andconflict of the novel. The third part studies the embodiment of Poetics in the plotdevelopment, such as the recognition, reversal and suffering of the plot. Part four analyzesthe application of the tragedy theory in characterization. The fifth part discusses thethree-dimensional structure of the character and plot, and the great originality of writingskills of Hardy. The sixth part concludes the paper by combining the preceding discussion.