Indeed the centre cannot hold: the book falls into fragments” (“Hardy” 469). It makes the case that what ails Jude is its unruliness and disjunctiveness: “the brilliance of the novel's peripheries can scarcely compensate for a profound weakness at its center. Weatherby, a foremost Hardy critic, serves as an outstanding example of such a critical view. An article entitled, “Hardy and the Fragmentation of Consciousness” (1975) by Harold L. The narrative was found most lacking in this respect. These notions were high on the agenda of the New Criticism of the 1940s and onwards.
The basic premise behind this conception was the aesthetic notion of structural and thematic unity as well as coherence and integrity of character.
In their evaluation of Jude the Obscure (1895), some earlier literary critics have justifiably (given the historical context) judged the text by the standards of the then dominant and sustained New Criticism trend, taking into account its symbiotic relationship with modernist aesthetics.
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