Exploring Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd

This free course, Exploring Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, is designed to tell you something about Hardy's background, and to introduce you to the pleasures of reading a nineteenth-century novel. Why do we believe in fictional characters and care about what happens to them? You will discover some of the techniques that Hardy uses to achieve an illusion of real people and their relationships in a real world. Through analysing narrative you will think about who the narrator is, and the importance of the narrative point of view in telling the story, as well as understanding how characterisation, the use of dialogue, time and locations work within the novel.Watch the following video in which Sue Asbee, the course author, introduces the course.

• Introduction
• Learning outcomes
• 1 Biography and context
• 1 Biography and context
• 2 Locations
• 2 Locations
• 3 Far From the Madding Crowd
• 3 Far From the Madding Crowd
• 4 Reading a chapter from Far From the Madding Crowd
• 4 Reading a chapter from Far From the Madding Crowd
• 4.1 The narrator
• 4.2 How does the narrator set the scene?
• 4.3 Style: what kind of writing is this?
• 4.4 Dialogue
• 4.5 What motivates Bathsheba to send the card to Boldwood?
• 5 Religion
• 5 Religion
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgements