Document Type : Original Article

Author

• Hossein Pourghasemian

English Language Center, Qom University of Technology, Qom, Iran

Abstract

The study intends to deal with Thomas Hardy’s attitude towards Victorian cultural concepts in his poetry .Patriotic feelings, war God, love, prodigal child, nature, fidelity of animals, ,hope, and death are among the Victorian cultural concepts which are presented and parodied in Hardy’s poems. He also ironically treats both rural and urban landscape images which were prevalent in the poetry of his time. The rural images including flowers,mountains, birds, sky, rivers, the sea, stars, are presented as observers of human pains and sufferings. The atmosphere of callousness and indifference is ruling over both rural and urban landscape images and man’s sufferings seem not to matter in Hardy’s poems at least as the poems in this study show.It should be noted that even in poems with rural images, the harsh and pessimistic tone of Hardy is striking and shadows the sympathy with rural simplicity. With urban life, Hardy is even less sympathetic.

Keywords

• Irony
• Parody
• Poetry
• Thomas Hardy
• Victorian Cultural Concepts