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.
Features a biographical chapter that relates Hawthorne's life to his work, a chapter on his career and contributions to American literature, and chapters that analyze his most important short stories and novels in turn.
The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne offers students and teachers an introduction to Hawthorne s fiction and the lively debates that shape Hawthorne studies today. In newly 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.
The Scarlet Letter is virtually unique among works of American fiction because it has not lapsed from print in over 140 years. The history of its reception, which is fully articulated in the volume introduction, may be read as a case study in canon formation. The collection of documents in the volume outline the highs and lows of Nathaniel Hawthorne's literary reputation and the elevation of his first and best-known romance to the rank of masterpiece and classic. Also included is a selective bibliography of modern scholarship. Among the early documents reprinted are contemporary news accounts of Hawthorne's dismissal from the Salem Custom House in June 1849, which provide the immediate background to The Custom House introduction in the story, the publisher James T. Fields's anecdotal version of the book's composition history, and a generous sheaf of notices from both American and British newspapers upon its publication in March, 1850. Of special value are the various essays and other materials that trace the institutionalization of the romance within the genteel tradition of American letters in the late nineteenth century. More recently, The Scarlet Letter has become something of an academic shibboleth, inspiring dozens of New Critical, psychoanalytical, feminist, and other readings, which are also represented in this collection. Prominent among modern critics whose essays appear are Neal Frank Doubleday, Darrel Abel, and Nina Baym. A number of reviews of theatrical and cinematic adaptations of the story also underscore its stature as a cultural icon. This volume is essential for serious research on Nathaniel Hawthorne and provides a convenient body of valuable commentary accessible even to the student reading The Scarlet Letter for the first time.
This volume brings together some of the high points of the last half-decade of Hawthorne criticism. The essays present a variety of critical viewpoints and an array of critical approaches. Some consider the cultural and historical contexts of Hawthorne's works, while others examine the state of Hawthorne studies through changing critical fashions. Some of the essays look to biographical speculation, some consider Hawthorne's psychology, and yet others look closely to those issues that concerned Hawthorne the most.
Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne met in 1850 and enjoyed for sixteen months an intense but brief friendship. Taking advantage of new interpretive tools such as queer theory, globalist studies, political and social ideology, marketplace analysis, psychoanalytical and philosophical applications to literature, masculinist theory, and critical studies of race, the twelve essays in this book focus on a number of provocative personal, professional, and literary ambiguities existing between the two writers. Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S. Person introduce the volume with a lively summary of the known biographical facts of the two writers’ relationship and an overview of the relevant scholarship to date. Some of the essays that follow broach the possibility of sexual dimensions to the relationship, a question that “looms like a grand hooded phantom” over the field of Melville-Hawthorne studies. Questions of influence--Hawthorne’s on Moby-Dick and Pierre and Melville’s on The Blithedale Romance, to mention only the most obvious instances--are also discussed. Other topics covered include professional competitiveness; Melville’s search for a father figure; masculine ambivalence in the marketplace; and political-literary aspects of nationalism, transcendentalism, race, and other defining issues of Hawthorne and Melville’s times. Roughly half of the essays focus on biographical issues; the others take literary perspectives. The essays are informed by a variety of critical approaches, as well as by new historical insights and new understandings of the possibilities that existed for male friendships in nineteenth-century American culture.
