چكيده لاتين :
The publication of numerous historical novels during the Victorian age attests to the survival of Sir Walter
Scott’s legacy of the Waverley novels. Nevertheless, Thomas Hardy’s Wessex historical novels form a break
from Scott’s tradition of Historical Romances. The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), and Tess of the d'Urbervilles
(1891) illustrate Hardy's substitution of the socio-economic and technological changes that took place in rural
England during the 1830s for Scott’s political context to portray their impact on the rural communities. At the
same time, Hardy’s Wessex novels, as well as his epic-drama The Dynasts (1903; 1905; 1908), which depicts the
rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, exhibit the skeptical spirit of the age in terms of their assimilation of the
principles of the leading philosophers, historians, and biologists of the times, such as Friedrich Nietzsche,
Auguste Comte, Arthur Schopenhauer, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Darwin. Hardy himself acknowledges their
impact on his ontological outlook on life in general, and on history in particular. Accordingly, using the above
mentioned texts as representatives of Hardy's work, the study aims at assessing the influence of those
intellectuals on Hardy’s work, in terms of his conception of the historical process, as a process of repeated
tragedies rather than of progress, his evaluation of change, as well as his views on the universal condition of
humanity throughout the ages; the study also focuses on Hardy’s fictional methods, such as his manipulation of
time, especially the connection of the ancient past with the present, to dramatize his personal convictions on
history and life.
