Chapter One INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is one of the greatest poets and novelists in Britain. He experiences two centuries and writes a number of works, which include long novels, short novels and poems. Athenaeum reviews that Mr. Hardy is perhaps the most vigorous of all the novelists who have appeared within the last two years; his powers of description, his skill in dividing ‘situations’, his quaint humor, secured him a high place among novelists of any age (Pobert, 1986). No one has ever achieved so great a success as Thomas Hardy in describing country (Williams, 2005). Virginia Woolf considers the death of Thomas Hardy leaves English fiction without a leader (1928). Far from the Madding Crowd published in 1874 is the first novel that gains Thomas Hardy great fame and wealth in his life. It tells us a love story about Bathsheba a beautiful young girl with great capability and vanity. There are three admirers of Bathsheba in this novel Gabriel Oak, Mr. Boldwood and Sergeant Troy. They all love Bathsheba. Gabriel Oak is described as a young warm-hearted, of sound judgment, easy motions farmer. He runs a small farm by his own hand at first and when all his sheep die he works for Bathsheba. Mr. Boldwood is a rich farm owner. His farm is next to Bathsheba’s, and he falls in love with Bathsheba when he got the trick Valentine's Day letter from Bathsheba. Sergeant Troy is a rhetoric person. He cheats the love of Fanny Robin, and causes Fanny’s death. He marries Bathsheba and leaves Bathsheba. He comes back when Bathsheba starts her new life again. He is killed by Mr. Boldwood in the end. All these three admirers whether rich or poor, whether rhetoric or without any words, show their love to Bathsheba in their own way. Of the whole story, request conversations become the most interesting part.
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1.2 Methodology
By making an analysis of the request conversation based on politeness principle in Far from the Madding Crowd, the thesis wants to find out the preference of each maxim used in each admirer’s request conversations for one thing; and prove functions and significance of the politeness principle in creating and appreciating literature works for another. Thus two questions have been proposed: First, which maxims have been used in the three admirers’ request conversations? Second, what characteristic is reflected by their use of each maxim in their request conversations? In order to solve these two problems, two kinds of research methodology have been used. First, quantitative analysis has been used to collect the maxims that applied in their request conversations. Second, qualitative analysis has been used to detect the characteristic of each admirer by analyzing the maxims they used in their conversations.
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Chapter Two LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Previous Studies on Thomas Hardy and Far from the Madding Crowd
Hardy is a productive writer. He writes 20 long novels and 900 poems in his life. He is honored as the “Shakespeare in English Fictions” (G.Q. Wang, 2005). Over a hundred years, researches on Thomas Hardy
