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10 books match the query 'Hawthorne'

cover of Certain Concealments: Poe, Hawthorne, and Early Nineteenth-Century Abortion

Certain Concealments

Poe, Hawthorne, and Early Nineteenth-Century Abortion

Dana Medoro

University of Massachusetts Press, 2022

Antebellum America saw a great upsurge in abortion, driven in part by the rise of the pharmaceutical industry. Unsurprisingly, the practice became increasingly visible in the popular culture and literature of the era, appearing openly in advertisements, popular fiction, and newspaper reports. One figure would come to dominate national headlines from the 1840s onward: Madame Restell. Facing public condemnation and mob attacks at her home for her dogged support of women’s reproductive rights, Restell built an empire selling her powders, pills, and services along the Eastern Seaboard.

Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne undoubtedly knew of Restell’s work and would go on to depict the incompatibility of abortion and nationalism in their writings. Through the thwarted plotlines, genealogical interruptions, and terminated ideas of Poe’s Dupin trilogy and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance, these authors consider new concepts around race, reproduction, and American exceptionalism. Dana Medoro demonstrates that their work can be usefully read in the context of debates on fetal life and personhood that circulated in the era.

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cover of HAWTHORNE AND THE REAL: BICENTENNIAL ESSAYS

HAWTHORNE AND THE REAL

BICENTENNIAL ESSAYS

MILLICENT BELL

The Ohio State University Press, 2005

In this edited collection commemorating the bicentennial of Hawthorne’s birth in 1804, Millicent Bell gathers essays by distinguished scholars and critics that examine the ways in which Hawthorne related himself to the “real” in his own world and expressed that relation in his writing. Radically revising the older view that he was detached from conditions of actual life in 19th-century American society, the authors undertake to show how current social conditions, current events, and political movements taking place at a crucial point in American history were an evident part of Hawthorne’s consciousness. The essays situate his imaginative writings in a contemporary context of common experience and rediscover a Hawthorne alert to pressing problems of his day, especially slavery, feminism, and reform in general—the very issues that motivated his contemporaries on the eve of the Civil War. 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. But the literary mode of his fiction has long needed to be redefined. The essays in this collection contribute to the turn in recent Hawthorne criticism which shows how deeply implicated in realism his writing was. This volume should long continue to provide new starting points for changing views of a great writer.
Contributors:
  • Millicent Bell
  • Nina Baym
  • Michael T. Gilmore
  • Leland S. Person
  • David Leverenz
  • Larry J. Reynolds
  • Lawrence Buell
  • Rita K. Gollin
  • John Carlos Row
  • Brenda Wineapple
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cover of Hawthorne and Women: Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition

Hawthorne and Women

Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition

John L. Idol

University of Massachusetts Press, 1999

Nathaniel Hawthorne is notorious for complaining in a letter to one of his publishers that a "damn'd mob of scribbling women" was stealing his audience. Elsewhere, he referred to women authors as "ink-stained Amazons" who were "without a single exception, detestable," and once expressed his wish that all women be "forbidden to write, on pain of having their faces deeply scarified with an oyster-shell."

This collection of original essays presents a more complex and positive view of Hawthorne's attitudes toward women, demonstrating his recognition of the crucial role that women played--as critics, reviewers, readers, and authors--in building a national readership that made his writing career so successful.

The book begins with an examination of the influence exerted by the women in Hawthorne's immediate family. It goes on to explore his links to a broad range of women writers, as well as his attitudes toward the female characters he created. Among the authors discussed are Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison.
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cover of Hawthorne in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life,Drawn from Recollections,Interviews, and Memoirs by Family,Frie

Hawthorne in His Own Time

A Biographical Chronicle of His Life,Drawn from Recollections,Interviews, and Memoirs by Family,Frie

Ronald A Bosco

University of Iowa Press, 2007

At his death, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) was universally acknowledged in America and England as "the Great Romancer." Novels such as The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables and stories published in such collections as Twice-Told Tales continue to capture the minds and imaginations of readers and critics to this day. Harder to capture, however, were the character and personality of the man himself. So few of the essays that appeared in the two years after his death offered new insights into his life, art, and reputation that Hawthorne seemed fated to premature obscurity or, at least, permanent misrepresentation. This first collection of personal reminiscences by those who knew Hawthorne intimately or knew about him through reliable secondary sources rescues him from these confusions and provides the real human history behind the successful writer.

Remembrances from Elizabeth Peabody, Sophia Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, and twenty others printed in Hawthorne in His Own Time follow him from his childhood in Salem, through his years of initial literary obscurity, his days in the Boston and Salem Custom Houses, his service as U.S. Consul to Liverpool and Manchester and his life in the Anglo-American communities at Rome and Florence, to his late years as the "Great Romancer."

In their enlightening introduction, editors Ronald Bosco and Jillmarie Murphy assess the postmortem building of Hawthorne's reputation as well as his relationship to the prominent Transcendentalists, spiritualists, Swedenborgians, and other personalities of his time. By clarifying the sentimental associations between Hawthorne's writings and his actual personality and moving away from the critical review to the personal narrative, these artful and perceptive reminiscences tell the private and public story of a remarkable life.

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cover of On Hawthorne: The Best from American Literature

On Hawthorne

The Best from American Literature

Edwin H. Cady and Louis J. Budd, eds.

Duke University Press, 1990

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.
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cover of Power Of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville

Power Of Blackness

Hawthorne, Poe, Melville

Harry Levin

Ohio University Press, 1980

The Power of Blackness is a profound and searching reinterpretation of Hawthorne, Poe and Melville, the three classic American masters of fiction. It is also an experiment in critical method, an exploration of the myth-making process by way of what may come to be known as literary iconology.
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cover of The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life

The Anatomy of National Fantasy

Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life

Lauren Berlant

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Examining the complex relationships between the political, popular, sexual, and textual interests of Nathaniel Hawthorne's work, Lauren Berlant argues that Hawthorne mounted a sophisticated challenge to America's collective fantasy of national unity. She shows how Hawthorne's idea of citizenship emerged from an attempt to adjudicate among the official and the popular, the national and the local, the collective and the individual, utopia and history.

At the core of Berlant's work is a three-part study of The Scarlet Letter, analyzing the modes and effects of national identity that characterize the narrator's representation of Puritan culture and his construction of the novel's political present tense. This analysis emerges from an introductory chapter on American citizenship in the 1850s and a following chapter on national fantasy, ranging from Hawthorne's early work "Alice Doane's Appeal" to the Statue of Liberty. In her conclusion, Berlant suggests that Hawthorne views everyday life and local political identities as alternate routes to the revitalization of the political and utopian promises of modern national life.
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cover of The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life

The Anatomy of National Fantasy

Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life

Lauren Berlant

University of Chicago Press, 2026

A classic work that launched the career of one of the most influential scholars of their generation.

Lauren Berlant influenced generations of scholars in gender studies, affect theory, literary criticism, anthropology, sociology, and beyond. Her first book, The Anatomy of National Fantasy, was published in 1991, and it marked the start of an extraordinary career of groundbreaking essays, editorial collaborations, and monographs. This new edition reintroduces Berlant’s earliest work with a new foreword by Caleb Smith, who connects Berlant’s initial investigations as a scholar of nineteenth-century American literature to her more widely known interventions in how we understand the entanglements of national ideology, citizenship, affect, and everyday life.

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cover of The Arbiters of Reality: Hawthorne, Melville, and the Rise of Mass Information Culture

The Arbiters of Reality

Hawthorne, Melville, and the Rise of Mass Information Culture

Peter West

The Ohio State University Press, 2008

The Arbiters of Reality: Hawthorne, Melville, and the Rise of Mass Information Culture disrupts our critical sense of nineteenth-century American literature by examining the storytelling strategies of both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville in light of an emerging information industry. Peter West reveals how these writers invoked telegraphic and penny press journalism, daguerreotypy, and moving panoramas in their fiction to claim for themselves a privileged access to a reality beyond the reach of a burgeoning mass audience.

      Locating Hawthorne and Melville in vivid and overlooked contexts—the Salem Murder scandal of 1830, which transformed Hawthorne's quiet city into a media-manufactured spectacle, and Melville's New York City of 1846–47, where the American Telegraph was powerfully articulating a nation at war—West portrays the romance as a reactive, deeply rhetorical literary form and a rich historical artifact.

      In the early twenty-first century, it has become a postmodern cliché to place the word “reality” in scare quotes. The Arbiters of Reality suggests that attending to the construction of the real in public life is more than simply a language of critique: it must also be understood as a specific kind of romantic self-invention. 

      
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cover of The Fragility of Manhood: Hawthorne, Freud, and the Politics of Gender

The Fragility of Manhood

Hawthorne, Freud, and the Politics of Gender

David Greven

The Ohio State University Press, 2012

Merging psychoanalytic and queer theory perspectives, The Fragility of Manhood: Hawthorne, Freud, and the Politics of Gender reframes Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work as a critique of the normative construction of American male identity. Revising Freudian and Lacanian literary theory and establishing the concepts of narcissism and the gaze as central, David Greven argues that Hawthorne represents normative masculinity as fundamentally dependent on the image. In ways that provocatively intersect with psychoanalytic theory, Hawthorne depicts subjectivity as identification with an illusory and deceptive image of wholeness and unity. As Hawthorne limns it, male narcissism both defines and decenters male heterosexual authority. Moreover, in Greven’s view, Hawthorne critiques hegemonic manhood’s recourse to domination as a symptom of the traumatic instabilities at the core of traditional models of male identity. Hawthorne’s representation of masculinity as psychically fragile has powerful implications for his depictions of female and queer subjectivity in works such as the tales “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and “The Gentle Boy,” the novel The Blithedale Romance, and Hawthorne’s critically neglected late, unfinished writings, such as Septimius Felton. Rereading Freud from a queer theory perspective, Greven reframes Freudian theory as a radical critique of traditional models of gender subjectivity that has fascinating overlaps with Hawthorne’s work. In the chapter “Visual Identity,” Greven also discusses the agonistic relationship between Hawthorne and Herman Melville and the intersection of queer themes, Hellenism, and classical art in their travel writings, The Marble Faun, and Billy Budd.
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