Jude the Obscure (1895) - Thomas Hardy
Related: autodidacts in fiction - incest in fiction - child murder (we are too many) - British literature - 1800s literature - 1895 - psychological novel
Memorable quote: Because no man would touch a woman unless she gives him reason to. A touch or a look that say come on. If you never look, they'll never come. You are the timid sex -- from Winterbottom's version
Memorable quote: Done because we are too many -- suicide note from Winterbottom's version
Publication of Jude the Obscure was greeted with outrage, with the bishop of Wakefield burning a copy, so Hardy abandoned novel-writing for poetry, publishing Wessex Poems in 1898. [Aug 2006]
Jude the Obscure is Hardy's most distinctly 'modern' work, for it rests upon a cluster of assumptions central to modernist literature: that in our time men wishing to be more than dumb clods must live in permanent doubt and intellectual crisis; that for such men, to whom traditional beliefs are no longer available, life has become inherently problematic . . . and that courage, if it is to be found at all, consists in readiness to accept pain while refusing the comforts of certainty. --Irving Howe, Thomas Hardy (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967), p. 134.
Jude the Obscure (1895) - Thomas Hardy [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Description
Jude the Obscure is the last of Thomas Hardy's novels, begun as a magazine serial and first published in book form in 1895. Its hero Jude Fawley is a lower-class young man who dreams of becoming a scholar. The two other main characters are his earthy wife, Arabella, and his intellectual cousin, Sue. Themes include class, scholarship, religion, marriage, and the modernization of thought and society. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jude_the_Obscure [Aug 2006]
While the novel has been considered unfilmable, Michael Winterbottom adapted it in 1996 .