Resumen
Critics have often sought to place Thomas Hardy?s fiction within a realist generic framework, with a significant emphasis on Hardy?s Wessex settings, visual imagination and equation of sight with knowledge. Yet Hardy?s writings frequently disturb realist generic conventions by introducing elements from popular nineteenth-century genres, particularly sensation fiction and the Gothic. This essay considers how murder as a plot device troubles generic boundaries in the novels Desperate Remedies (1871), Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Tess of the d?Urbervilles (1891). Set against backgrounds with significant non-realist elements, these texts view murder and its punishment from limited, distorted or averted perspectives that articulate a significant social and cultural critique.