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Realism In Far From The Madding Crowd

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In his essay ‘The Profitable Reading of Fiction’ (1888) Hardy, proclaims that ‘an attentive reader will catch the vision the writer has in his eye, and is endeavouring to project upon the paper, even when it half eludes him’. (Regan, 2000p.325-326). However, at the time of writing Far From the Madding Crowd, Hardy was unaware of the anxiety he would go through to portray the intended verisimilitude of his narrative to his readership. Hardy’s initial objective was to present a retrospective view of reality in a rural community rapidly changing within this new industrial society. Leslie Stephen editor of the prestigious Cornhill Magazine first commissioned Hardy to write Far From The Madding Crowd, which was serialised in the magazine between …show more content…

However, the novel’s genre is undefined, and subtly incorporates a blend of genres into a carefully constructed framework such as, gothic, melodrama, sensationalism, satire and caustic irony. The serialisation was visual and contrasted with Hardy’s dramatic use of imagery and artistic convention. Most people are not aware that the chapters sent to Stephen were not only sent in month by month, but temporal and correspond to the calendar year month with month.
A large engraved illustration and a small initial-letter vignette by Helen Allingham (née Paterson) accompanied each instalment of the Cornhill Magazine version. These illustrations combined with verbal prompts provided clarity and signified meaning. However, Allingham’s illustrations sometimes have a restricted understanding of the rural life that Hardy was trying to portray, due to the distinctive lack of animals in her illustrations (with the notable exceptions of Bathsheba with a pony in plates 2 and 4 (Archive.org). However, the vignettes do focus more on country life more than the plates do, but the animals tend to be obscured, such as in vignette 5 which shows Gabriel astride a sheep while shearing it

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