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Can anyone help me? 

dhen,

Are those your requirements? Do you have to write on those topics? How about a feminist approach, or a constructionist/destructionist approach? A feminist approach or a destructionist approach might work well with Hardy. I have seen a few journal articles already on this subject concerning his novels.

Hardy sets his stories in small villages and towns, and is drawn to experiences of disappointment and failure. His major novels end with the destruction of the main character, and the intense suffering of those characters often seems undeserved. There is no sense of poetic justice in Hardy’s world: Virtue is not necessarily rewarded, and vice may be punished excessively. This aspect of Hardy’s fiction is often identified with what critics call his “pessimism.”

One example will be Hardy’s most famous and popular novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). Tess ends with the heroine’s execution for the crime of murder. There had been a few tragic novels in England—including Richardson’s Clarissa and Eliot’s Mill on the Floss—but Hardy is the first English novelist who consistently works in a tragic mode. The roots of Hardy’s pessimism may lie in his earliest experiences.

Hardy was born in 1840 and died in 1928. He was, in many ways, an outsider, distinctly different from other writers of his day. His father was a stonemason—not exactly a laborer, but not a professional either. Hardy’s early education was good, but instead of attending college, he was apprenticed to a local architect. Hardy’s marriage is another possible source of his later pessimism. By the time he reached his late 40s, he and his wife were leading separate lives.

In "Tess", Hardy was testing the limits of what was considered acceptable. Central to the novel are issues of sex and sexual desire. The novel begins by placing Tess in a situation like that of Richardson’s heroines. Tess is first pursued by her wealthy employer and cousin, Alec D’Urberville. But instead of being rewarded with an offer of marriage, Tess is either raped or seduced (the situation is unclear) and drawn into a brief sexual relationship with Alec, during the course of which she becomes pregnant. Through the rest of the novel, Hardy continues to challenge conventional attitudes toward sex.

After leaving Alec, Tess returns to live with her family. Her baby dies in infancy, and Tess learns that because it was never properly baptized, it cannot be buried in the churchyard. Throughout the rest of the novel, Hardy repeatedly insists that sexual desire should not be regarded as sinful. To stigmatize sex, he says, is to deny our own essential nature. When preparing the novel for its original serial publication, Hardy decided to remove and publish separately some of the most controversial episodes, a process that he compared to dismembering a body. When it came time to republish Tess in volume form, he not only reincorporated the missing episodes but added a provocative subtitle, boldly identifying Tess as a “pure woman.”