Thomas Hardy’s "The Return of the Native" (Zoom)

Thomas Hardy’s "The Return of the Native" (Zoom)

Spring (14 hrs or more) | This course is completed

Online Lebanon, NH 03766 United States

Online Meeting

4/9/2024-4/30/2024

9:00 AM-11:00 AM EDT on Tue Th

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$90.00

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Class meets twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays:
April 9, 11, 16, 18, 23, 25, 30

One of Thomas Hardy’s most powerful works, The Return of the Native, centers on Egdon Heath, the wild, haunted Wessex moor that D.H. Lawrence called “the real stuff of tragedy.”

The heath’s changing face mirrors the fortunes of the farmers, innkeepers, sons, mothers, and lovers who populate the novel. The “native” is Clym Yeobright, who comes home from a cosmopolitan life in Paris, hoping to establish himself as a local schoolteacher. Yeobright, his cousin Thomasin, her fiancé, Damon Wildeve, and the willful Eustacia Vye (“the raw material of a divinity”) are the protagonists in a complex tale of doomed love, passion, and despair. The novel explores—within its richly-created pre-industrial rural setting—modern themes such as the tragic potential of romantic illusion, the diabolical role of chance in determining the course of a life, and nature’s apathy, even hostility, toward human beings.

We’ll explore this novel within the historical and cultural contexts it so amply provides. Reading comprises about 70 pages per class.

 


  • Required Book:

    The Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy (ISBN-13: 978-0393927870)

     

Deutsch, Phyllis

Phyllis Deutsch holds a PhD in modern European history from New York University. For several years, she taught history at NYU, Columbia University, The New School for Social Research, and the University of Pennsylvania. For 15 years, she served as editor-in-chief at University Press of New England, where she published numerous titles in the fields of 19th century history, literature, and culture. She is currently a Lecturer in the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric at Dartmouth College.