British novelist and poet who wrote Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Jude the Obscure — exploring the crushing of individual aspiration and natural impulse by social convention and cosmic indifference in rural Victorian England.
Creates the tragic vision in which sensitive, intelligent individuals are destroyed by the collision between their inner nature and a social order that cannot accommodate it — making Hardy the Victorian novelist most aligned with depth psychology's interest in what society represses.
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