DOI: 10.36344/ccijhss.2017.v03i01.007

Pages: 32-34

Thomas Hardy’s visual imagination, his eye for colours, play of light and shade and the sweep from the vast spaces to the finite human world is present in every page of his novels, which makes his novels so easily transformable into movies. His developing interest and fascination for painting and the visual arts which enriched his mode of writing fiction and also provided a different dimension to the reader to be able to read his novel in more innovative and experimental modes. Hardy’s love for rural England and his rarified and fictionalized setting for his novels – Wessex – and his depiction of the customs, folklores and colours of a rustic world rapidly transforming at the advent of industrialization finds life in his pictorial mode of descriptions. His novels are like moving pictures enacted in the mind of the reader and therefore film adaptations borrow heavily from these pictorial aspects of his novels, which accounts for the popularity of his novels with film makers across the globe.