Author: Millicent Bell
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814209866
Category : Literature and society
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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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.
Author: Nina Baym
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501735683
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
This gracefully written book considers all of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s works, from Fanshawe through the unfinished romances of his last years, and establishes the pattern of his literary development. Ms. Baym brings the crucial facts of Hawthorne’s career into clear focus, and places the individual works within the total picture. Disputing some enduring critical pieties, she finds in Hawthorne a writer who experimented with a series of literary poses through which he tried both to discover himself and to please his audience. He realized late, she says, the paradox that the more he departed from conventional modes, the more "popular" his writing became. By looking discerningly at all of Hawthorne’s work as it unfolded, Ms. Baym produces compelling new insights into a major American writer and adds appreciably to our understanding of him.
Author: Robert Milder
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199311498
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
The first literary/biographical study of Hawthorne's full career in almost forty years, Hawthorne's Habitations presents a self-divided man and writer strongly attracted to reality for its own sake and remarkably adept at rendering it yet fearful of the nothingness he intuited at its heart. Making extensive use of Hawthorne's notebooks and letters as well as nearly all of his important fiction, Robert Milder's superb intellectual biography distinguishes between "two Hawthornes," then maps them onto the physical and cultural locales that were formative for Hawthorne's character and work: Salem, Massachusetts, Hawthorne's ancestral home and ingrained point of reference; Concord, Massachusetts, where came into contact with Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller and absorbed the Adamic spirit of the American Renaissance; England, where he served for five years as consul in Liverpool, incorporating an element of Englishness; and Italy, where he found himself, like Henry James's expatriate Americans, confronted by an older, denser civilization morally and culturally at variance with his own.
Author: Brenda Wineapple
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307808661
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 530
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Book Description
Handsome, reserved, almost frighteningly aloof until he was approached, then playful, cordial, Nathaniel Hawthorne was as mercurial and double-edged as his writing. “Deep as Dante,” Herman Melville said. Hawthorne himself declared that he was not “one of those supremely hospitable people who serve up their own hearts, delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit” for the public. Yet those who knew him best often took the opposite position. “He always puts himself in his books,” said his sister-in-law Mary Mann, “he cannot help it.” His life, like his work, was extraordinary, a play of light and shadow. In this major new biography of Hawthorne, the first in more than a decade, Brenda Wineapple, acclaimed biographer of Janet Flanner and Gertrude and Leo Stein (“Luminous”–Richard Howard), brings him brilliantly alive: an exquisite writer who shoveled dung in an attempt to found a new utopia at Brook Farm and then excoriated the community (or his attraction to it) in caustic satire; the confidant of Franklin Pierce, fourteenth president of the United States and arguably one of its worst; friend to Emerson and Thoreau and Melville who, unlike them, made fun of Abraham Lincoln and who, also unlike them, wrote compellingly of women, deeply identifying with them–he was the first major American writer to create erotic female characters. Those vibrant, independent women continue to haunt the imagination, although Hawthorne often punishes, humiliates, or kills them, as if exorcising that which enthralls. Here is the man rooted in Salem, Massachusetts, of an old pre-Revolutionary family, reared partly in the wilds of western Maine, then schooled along with Longfellow at Bowdoin College. Here are his idyllic marriage to the youngest and prettiest of the Peabody sisters and his longtime friendships, including with Margaret Fuller, the notorious feminist writer and intellectual. Here too is Hawthorne at the end of his days, revered as a genius, but considered as well to be an embarrassing puzzle by the Boston intelligentsia, isolated by fiercely held political loyalties that placed him against the Civil War and the currents of his time. Brenda Wineapple navigates the high tides and chill undercurrents of Hawthorne’s fascinating life and work with clarity, nuance, and insight. The novels and tales, the incidental writings, travel notes and children’s books, letters and diaries reverberate in this biography, which both charts and protects the dark unknowable core that is quintessentially Hawthorne. In him, the quest of his generation for an authentically American voice bears disquieting fruit.
Author: Richard H. Brodhead
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195363027
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
In The School of Hawthorne, Brodhead uses Hawthorne as a prime example of how literary traditions are made, not born. Under Brodhead's scrutiny, the Hawthorne tradition opens out onto a wide array of subjects, many of which have received little previous attention. He offers a detailed account of Hawthorne's life in American letters, showing how authors as varied as Melville, Howells, James, and Faulkner have learned from Hawthorne's model while all the while changing the terms in which he has been read. As he traces Hawthorne's continued life among his heirs, Brodhead also reflects on the ways in which writers receive and resist official tradition, how their work is conditioned by the institutionalized pasts that surround them, and how they go about creating new traditions to counter existing ones. An important contribution to literary history, The School of Hawthorne also establishes new ways in which literary history itself can be understood.
Author: Edwin Harrison Cady
Publisher: Durham [N.C.] : Duke University Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
From 1929 to the latest issue, American Literature has been the foremost journal expressing the findings of those who study our national literature. The jouranl has published the best work of literary historians, critics, and bibliographers, ranging from the founders of the discipline to the best current critics and researchers. The longevity of this excellence lends a special distinction to the articles in American Literature. Presented in order of their first appearance, the articles in each volume constitute a revealing record of developing insights and important shifts of critical emphasis. Each article has opened a fresh line of inquiry, established a fresh perspective on a familiar topic, or settled a question that engaged the interest of experts.
Author: Deanna Fernie
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351931547
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
Deanna Fernie analyzes the significance of sculpture in Hawthorne's fiction through the recurring motif of the fragment in its double guise as ruin and project. Her book casts new light on Hawthorne's memorable ruined and unfinished images, from the rough-hewn figurehead of 'Drowne's Wooden Image' (1844) to the tattered letter 'A' in the unfinished loft of the Custom House in The Scarlet Letter (1850) and the unfinished bust of Donatello in The Marble Faun (1860). Fernie shows how the tension between the formed and unformed enabled Hawthorne to interrogate the origins and the distinctive possibilities of art in America in relation to established European models. At the same time, she suggests that sculpture challenged and provoked Hawthorne's shaping of his own specifically literary art, stimulating him to develop its capacities for expressing irresolution and change. Fernie establishes the intellectual contexts for her study through a discussion of sculpture and fragmentary form as revealed in American, British, and Continental thought. Her book will be an important text not only for American literature scholars but also for anyone interested in British and Continental Romanticism and the intersections of art and literature.
Author: John McWilliams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521311465
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
This book considers the portrayal of the American national character in the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. It examines Hawthorne's abiding concern with the development of New England from colony to province to republic, and analyses Melville's changing evocation of 'the new American', and the difficulties he faced in sustaining his heady nationalistic faith.
Author: Richard H. Millington
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139826670
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 507
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Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne, first published in 2004, offers students and teachers an introduction to Hawthorne's fiction and the lively debates that shape Hawthorne studies. In commissioned essays, twelve eminent scholars of American literature introduce readers to key issues in Hawthorne scholarship and deepen our understanding of Hawthorne's writing. Each of the major novels is treated in a separate chapter, while other essays explore Hawthorne's art in relation to a stimulating array of issues and approaches. The essays reveal how Hawthorne's work explores understandings of gender relations and sexuality, of childhood and selfhood, of politics and ethics, of history and modernity. An Introduction and a selected bibliography will help students and teachers understand how Hawthorne has been a crucial figure for each generation of readers of American literature.
Author: Sarah Bird Wright
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438108532
Category : Authors, American
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
Offers critical entries on Hawthorne's novels, short stories, travel writing, criticism, and other works, as well as portraits of characters, including Hester Prynne and Roger Chillingworth. This reference also provides entries on Hawthorne's family, friends - ranging from Herman Melville to President Franklin Pierce - publishers, and critics.
