Thomas Hardy's Betraying Heart: Realism and Bodily Affect

Abstract: This article examines how Thomas Hardy's fiction turns to the heart as a privileged figure for grappling with one of the great philosophical challenges of the novel form: how to put the corporeality of emotional experience into words? It contextualizes Hardy's cardiac poetics in relation to historical and contemporary scientific and medical understandings of bodily affect. The conclusion argues that Hardy's heart-centered strategies of affective description can at once illuminate his uneasy relationship with realism's normative operations and pluralize critical understanding of realism and its characteristic methods for dramatizing philosophical accounts of human experience.