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Moore, an author and independent scholar, examines Salem's past and the role of Hawthorne's ancestors in two of the town's great events: the coming of the Quakers in the 1660s and the witchcraft delusion of 1692. She investigates Hawthorne's family, his education before college, and Salem's religious and political influences on him. She also discusses Salem nightlife in Hawthorne's time, his friends and acquaintances, and the role of women influential in his life--particularly Mary Crowninshield Silsbee and Sophia Peabody. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
In The Wedding Complex Elizabeth Freeman explores the significance of the wedding ceremony by asking what the wedding becomes when you separate it from the idea of marriage. Freeman finds that weddings—as performances, fantasies, and rituals of transformation—are sites for imagining and enacting forms of social intimacy other than monogamous heterosexuality. Looking at the history of Anglo-American weddings and their depictions in American literature and popular culture from the antebellum era to the present, she reveals the cluster of queer desires at the heart of the "wedding complex"—longings not for marriage necessarily but for public forms of attachment, ceremony, pageantry, and c...
The Wall and the Garden was first published in 1968. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The election day sermon in colonial New England was an annual, formal address by a minister of the gospel to the newly assembled legislature of the colony. The tradition began in the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1634, and it continued, in Boston, for 250 years. In this volume, Professor Plumstead presents a collection of nine of the Massachusetts election sermons, chosen from among the surviving Massachusetts sermons which were printed between 1661 and ...
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.
First Published in 2002. This work reads Hawthorne's fiction inthe context of nineteenth-century medical and psuedomedical discourse that linked men of letters to debilitated invalids, a stereotype against which Hawthorne struggled throughout his career.
Richard Jacobson examines and delineates the processes of mind that Hawthorne conceived of as underlying the creative act. Taking issue with previous studies that have presented the novelist as an adherent of one or another of the particular schools of thought representative of his time, the author demonstrates that Hawthorne's views were, in fact, eclectically formed and were a fusion of classical and romantic attitudes. His intense preoccupation with the relationship between art and morality, and the validation of imaginative insights are central elements, Jacobson maintains, in Hawthorne's theory of the creative process.
First published in 1984, this book offers a unique interpretation of Hawthorne’s work, making use of perspectives opened up by Derrida in his work on Rousseau. It offers a psycho-biography of the author as discoverable in the texts and avoids a simplistic Freudian analysis. In doing so, it illuminates the work and re-opens Hawthorne’s texts to creative discussion. This book will be of interest to those studying 19th century literature.
Hawthorne's Habitations draws on letters, manuscripts, and the author's little studied French and Italian notebooks, to present a portrait of four fascinating locations in the middle of the nineteenth century and offer a convincing portrait of the way place informed Hawthorne's melancholy psychology and dark style.
In Civilized Creatures, Jennifer Mason challenges some of our most enduring ideas about how encounters with nonhuman nature shaped American literature and culture. Mason argues that in the second half of the nineteenth century the most powerful influence on Americans' understanding of their affinities with animals was not increasing separation from the pastoral and the wilderness; instead, it was the population's feelings about the ostensibly civilized animals they encountered in their daily lives. Americans of diverse backgrounds, Mason shows, found it attractive as well as politic to imagine themselves as most closely connected to those creatures who shared humans' aptitude for civilized l...
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.