Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd and the Turn of the Lyric

Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd can be considered a representative example of the Romantic mode in fiction. The peculiarity of this novel is its blend of realism and romance, the natural and the supernatural, which is a recurring blend in Hardy’s opera omnia. The ordinary and the less ordinary facts are juxtaposed to give rise to a blend of themes, topics and images which call to mind similar syncretic worlds in many Romantic texts. The shift from the earthly to the eerie sphere is often undetectable in Hardy’s work where the dimensions of the local and the universal are intermingled and the folkloric supernatural beliefs do not clash with aspects belonging to a more profound religious and psychological domain. Hence the tension between believable and unbelievable, so that readers themselves are led to experience a continuous switch from bewilderment to incredulity. Far From the Madding Crowd is worth the attention of the reader of Romantic literature because it pivots around some of the essential dualisms of that movement such as the antithesis of fact and fiction, the compound of the particular and the universal, and the syncretized appeal to both our senses and our imagination