Thomas Hardy and the Folk Horror Tradition takes the uncanny and
unsettling fiction of Thomas Hardy as fundamental in examining the
lineage of 'Hardyan Folk Horror'. Hardy's novels and his short fiction
often delve into a world of folklore and what was, for Hardy the recent
past. Hardy's Wessex plays out tensions between the rational and
irrational, the pagan and the Christian, the past and the 'enlightened'
future. Examining these tensions in Hardy's life and his work provides a
foundation for exploring the themes that develop in the latter half of
the 20th century and again in the 21st century into a definable genre,
folk horror*.
*
This study analyses the subduing function of heritage drama via analysis
of adaptations of Hardy's work to this financially lucrative film
market. This is a market in which the inclusion of the weird and the
eerie does not fit with the construction of a past and their function in
creating a nostalgia of a safe and idyllic picture of England's rural
past. However, there are some lesser-known adaptations from the 1970s
that sit alongside the unholy trinity of folk horror: the adaptation for
television of the Wessex Tales. From a consideration of the
epistemological fissure that characterize Hardy's world, the book draws
parallels between then and now and the manifestation of writing on
conceptual borders. Through this comparative analysis, Thomas Hardy and
the Folk Horror Tradition posits that we currently exist on a moment of
fracture, when tradition sits as a seductive threat.
