Rediscovering Hawthorne

Rediscovering Hawthorne PDF Author: Kenneth Dauber
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400872448
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
Starting from Hawthorne's statement that his works are attempts to open an intercourse with the world, Kenneth Dauber examines them to see how they serve as acts of communication. Thus his investigation of a major American writer studies Hawthorne as a craftsman, explores the conditions under which various interpretations of literature are possible, and lays the foundation for a new theory of genres. The author begins with a brief history of American criticism from the rediscovery of classic American letters to the present. He traces the development of historicism and formalism as the two major strains of native critical thought and demonstrates their specific limitations in connection with a study of Hawthorne's allegory. By redefining literature according to Hawthorne's work and reexamining the role of the critic in view of the circumstances of American letters, Professor Dauber is able to propose a native poetics. Central to the author's theory is the concept of genre as a pre-existing structure with which Hawthorne battled and through which he sought communion. This ambivalence is analyzed in chapters on the four novels and selected stories. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Rediscovering Hawthorne

Rediscovering Hawthorne PDF Author: Kenneth Dauber
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400872448
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
Starting from Hawthorne's statement that his works are attempts to open an intercourse with the world, Kenneth Dauber examines them to see how they serve as acts of communication. Thus his investigation of a major American writer studies Hawthorne as a craftsman, explores the conditions under which various interpretations of literature are possible, and lays the foundation for a new theory of genres. The author begins with a brief history of American criticism from the rediscovery of classic American letters to the present. He traces the development of historicism and formalism as the two major strains of native critical thought and demonstrates their specific limitations in connection with a study of Hawthorne's allegory. By redefining literature according to Hawthorne's work and reexamining the role of the critic in view of the circumstances of American letters, Professor Dauber is able to propose a native poetics. Central to the author's theory is the concept of genre as a pre-existing structure with which Hawthorne battled and through which he sought communion. This ambivalence is analyzed in chapters on the four novels and selected stories. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

New Essays on Hawthorne's Major Tales

New Essays on Hawthorne's Major Tales PDF Author: Millicent Bell
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521428682
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines in detail some of Hawthorne's most important and most beloved stories.

The Productive Tension of Hawthorne's Art

The Productive Tension of Hawthorne's Art PDF Author: Claudia Durst Johnson
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817300511
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 171

Get Book Here

Book Description
In both his short fiction and major works, Nathaniel Hawthorne, like many romantics, is torn between the eighteenth-century view of an orderly, balanced, static art and universe, on the one hand, and the nineteenth-century conception of a changeful, various art on the other. Hawthorne based his social and psychological values on an organic view of the world, but the world of his art tended to be mechanistic. Johnson argues that Hawthorne found in theology the myths which became vehicles for his exploration of his art.

Hawthorne and the Real

Hawthorne and the Real PDF Author: Millicent Bell
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814209866
Category : Literature and society
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book Here

Book Description
Hawthorne was, with his own complicity, long described as a writer of unreal romances (as he preferred to call his novels) or "allegories of the heart" as he termed some of his short stories. The essays in this collection contribute to the turn in recent Hawthorne criticism which shows how deeply implicated in realism his writing was."--BOOK JACKET.

Interpretive Conventions

Interpretive Conventions PDF Author: Steven Mailloux
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501720953
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Interpretive Conventions, Steven Mailloux provides a general introduction to reader-response criticism while developing his own specific reader-oriented approach to literature. He examines five influential theories of the reading process—those of Stanley Fish, Jonathan Culler, Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland, and David Bleich. He goes on to argue the need for a more comprehensive reader-response criticism based on a consistent social model of reading. He develops such a reading model and also discusses American textual editing and literary history.

The Art of Authorial Presence

The Art of Authorial Presence PDF Author: Gary Richard Thompson
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822313212
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
The critical literary world has spent a wealth of thought and words on the question of Hawthorne himself: Where does he stand in his works? In history? In literary tradition? In this major new study, G. R. Thompson recasts the "Hawthorne question" to show how authorial presence in the writer's works is as much a matter of art as the writing itself. The Hawthorne who emerges from this masterful analysis is not, as has been supposed, identical to the provincial narrator of his early tales; instead he is revealed to be the skillful manipulator of that narrative voice, an author at an ironic distance from the tales he tells. By focusing on the provincial tales as they were originally conceived--as a narrative cycle--Thompson is able to recover intertextual references that reveal Hawthorne's preoccupation with framing strategies and variations on authorial presence. The author shows how Hawthorne deliberately constructs sentimental narratives, only to deconstruct them. Thompson's analysis provides a new aesthetic context for understanding the whole shape of Hawthorne's career as well as the narrative, ethical, and historical issues within individual works. Revisionary in its view of one of America's greatest authors, The Art of Authorial Presence also offers invaluable insight into the problems of narratology and historiography, ethics and psychology, romanticism and idealism, and the cultural myths of America.

Reverse Tradition

Reverse Tradition PDF Author: Robert Kiely
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674767034
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reverse Tradition invites the reader of postmodern fiction to travel back to the nineteenth-century novel without pretending to let go of contemporary anxieties and expectations. What happens to the reader of Beckett when he or she returns to Melville? Or to the enthusiast of Toni Morrison who rereads Charlotte Bronte? While Robert Kiely does not claim that all fictions begin to look alike, he finds unexpected and illuminating pleasures in examining a variety of ways in which new texts reflect on old. In this engaging book, Kiely not only juxtaposes familiar authors in unfamiliar ways; he proposes a countertradition of intertextuality and a way to release the genie of postmodernism from the bottleneck of the late twentieth century. Placing the reader's response at the crux, he offers arresting new readings by pairing, among others, Jorge Luis Borges with Mark Twain, and Maxine Hong Kingston with George Eliot. In the process, he tests and challenges common assumptions about transparency in nineteenth-century realism and a historical opacity in early and late postmodernism.

Holding the Line

Holding the Line PDF Author: Clive Bush
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039115716
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book comprises a selection of interdisciplinary essays in American literature and culture written by Clive Bush over some forty years. They fall into four sections: Classic American Literature; Literary and Cultural Modernism; Literature and Politics; and American Cultural Studies. The topics range from literature to architecture, from the history of linguistics to analyses of the commodity culture, from poetry to film. The essays themselves extend from American linguistics to Beat literature. There is, however, an identifiable series of common themes and perspectives throughout. The first is the question of the relation of discourse itself to the practices of power: personal, social and political. The second is the attention paid to the particular and general historical context in which both texts and quasi-texts are situated. The third is that a European perspective, making use of comparative texts, has been used throughout. The author demonstrates a commitment both to close reading and to the value judgement in the reading of texts.

Nothing Abstract

Nothing Abstract PDF Author: Tom Quirk
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826263089
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book Here

Book Description
Written by one of the leading scholars in the field, Nothing Abstract is a collection of essays gathered over the past twenty years -- all of which, in some fashion, have to do with a genetic approach to literary study. In previous books, the author has traced the compositional histories of certain literary works, the course of individual careers, and the genesis of literary movements. In this book, Tom Quirk resists the direction taken by contemporary theory in favor of an approach to literature through source and influence study, the evolution of a writer's achievement, the establishment of biographical or other contexts, and the transition from one literary era to another.

Manhood and the American Renaissance

Manhood and the American Renaissance PDF Author: David Leverenz
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501744143
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 387

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the view of David Leverenz, such nineteenth-century American male writers as Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman were influenced more profoundly by the popular model of the entrepreneurial "man of force" than they were by their literary precursors and contemporaries. Drawing on the insights of feminist theory, gender studies, psychoanalytical criticism, and social history, Manhood and the American Renaissance demonstrates that gender pressures and class conflicts played as critical a role in literary creation for the male writers of nineteenth-century America as they did for the women writers. Leverenz interprets male American authors in terms of three major ideologies of manhood linked to the social classes in the Northeast-patrician, artisan, and entrepreneurial. He asserts that the older ideologies of patrician gentility and of artisan independence were being challenged from 1820 to 1860 by the new middle-class ideology of competitive individualism. The male writers of the American Renaissance, patrician almost without exception in their backgrounds and self-expectations, were fascinated yet horrified by the aggressive materialism and the rivalry for dominance they witnessed in the undeferential "new men." In close readings of the works both of well-known male literary figures and of then popular authors such as Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and Francis Parkman, Leverenz discovers a repressed center of manhood beset by fears of humiliation and masochistic fantasies. He discerns different patterns in the works of Whitman, with his artisan's background, and Frederick Douglass, who rose from artisan freedom to entrepreneurial power. Emphasizing the interplay of class and gender, Leverenz also considers how women viewed manhood. He concludes that male writers portrayed manhood as a rivalry for dominance, but contemporary female writers saw it as patriarchy. Two chapters contrast the work of the genteel writers Sarah Hale and Caroline Kirkland with the evangelical works of Susan Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe. A bold and imaginative work, Manhood and the American Renaissance will enlighten and inspire controversy among all students of American literature, nineteenth-century American history, and the relation of gender and literature.