Connolly, Thomas E. 1999 0-7734-8143-5 156 pages These essays deal with the compositional and literary scope of the authors, resulting from the author's personal interest in and teaching.
Ponder, Melinda M. 1990 0-88946-117-1 260 pages Focuses on transatlantic historical aesthetic debates which informed Hawthorne's literary and philosophical education at Bowdoin College as well as his subsequent self-designed program of reading at the Salem Athenaeum, showing the way in which Hawthorne's early conception of narrative art and the central importance of the narrative persona grew out of his education in the 18th-century Anglo-Scottish literary theorists. For scholars of Hawthorne, students of the American Renaissance and 18th-century British literature, and generalists who teach short stories.
Courtmanche, Jason Charles 2008 0-7734-5017-3 268 pages This work examines the influence of Puritan thought and typology and the persecutorial actions of the ancestors of Nathanial Hawthorne on his literature. Typological allusions and typological layering, in which fictional characters are portrayed as recurrent types found throughout the Bible, myth, and history, require readers to perform an hermeneutical exercise of interpretation in order to gain insight into the nature of sin.
Williamson, Richard J. 2007 0-7734-5647-3 180 pages This book demonstrates how Nathaniel Hawthorne’s lifelong friendship with Franklin Pierce influenced the author’s literary imagination, often prompting him to transform Pierce from his historical personage into a romanticized figure of distinctly Jacksonian qualities. The book also examines how Hawthorne’s friendship with Pierce profoundly influenced a wide range of his work, from his first novel, Fanshawe (1828), to the Life of Franklin Pierce (1852) and such later works as the unfinished Septimius romances and the dedicatory materials in Our Old Home (1863). Finally, the book shows how Pierce became for Hawthorne a literary device – an icon of Jacksonian virtue, a token of the Democratic party, and an emblem of steadfastness, military heroism, and integrity, all three of which were often at odds with Pierce’s historical character.
Colgan, Kathleen P. 2002 0-7734-7359-9 328 pages Drawing upon the disciplines of literary analysis and political theory, this study reviews and considers the notable influence of actual political events and ideologies on Hawthorne, and argues that he reacted to radical reform ideologies with a set of beliefs and understandings characteristic of the conservative political thinker. It also demonstrates that Hawthorne, like Burke, distinguished between the philosophic justification for the American Revolution and the ideological impetus for the French Revolution.
“The brooding pessimism underlying Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fiction has often drawn scholarly comment, but Kathleen Colgan’s courageous book takes us directly to the smouldering edge of his profound doubts about human nature and social institutions. . . . Colgan’s articulate and deeply researched study pays particular attention to Hawthorne’s attitudes regarding the philosophers, historians, and events connected with the French Revolution, and then identifies the echoes of these opinions in his fiction and essays. The result is a book that reminds us again that we cannot outrun history and moreover, that Hawthorne can never be adequately understood outside the political and cultural context of his times.” – Alan Gribben
Martin, Laura 2000 0-7734-7809-4 224 pages This study shows how the works in question (Goethe’s “Die pilgernde Törin”; Kleist’s “Die Marquise von O. . .”, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and James’s Daisy Miller) can appeal to the reader who identifies a message friendly towards woman and her plight, whether this ‘message’ can be considered a part of the author’s intention or not. These works, through mere description of the impossibility of women characters’ situations without any prescription for change, can often be found to carry meanings more critical of the status quo than at first may seem the case. Such an interpretation often goes against the tradition of criticism that has built up around the works, but it is based on concrete evidence in the text.
Timmerman, John H. 2013 0-7734-4466-1 288 pages This eclectic book explores Hawthorne’s study of the ambiguities of the human heart. It reaches in many directions and touches on a surprising diverse set of sources ranging from Plato, Augustine, Milton, Calvin, Luther and Coleridge to Sartre, Heidegger, Munch, C.S. Lewis, Cormac McCarthy, Solzhenitsyn, and an array of Hawthorne’s critics.
Muirhead, Kimberly Free 2004 0-7734-6196-5 644 pages This book provides a "selectively comprehensive" and cross-referenced record of the enormous body of scholarship on The Scarlet Letter from 1950 to 2000, as well as an introductory overview of the major patterns and trends in the critical interpretations of the novel. Designed for both new and seasoned readers/critics, the four-part study can be used in two ways: as a chronological record and historical survey of the development of ideas in criticism over five decades, and as a reference guide that can be accessed through the Author, Subject, and Critical Approach Indexes.
Part I provides a chronological, annotated listing of the most frequently anthologized "Early Reviews" of the novel. Part II offers full citations for "Early Influential Criticism [Pre-l 950]" and is comprised of forty-one landmark commentaries that appeared between 1850 and 1 950. Part III, which makes up the bulk of the project and begins with the year 1950, presents a comprehensive annotated bibliography of Scarlet Letter criticism that includes books, articles, special critical editions, collections of criticism, general student introductions and help books, teaching aids and guides, and biographies. The six-part Resource Guide that makes up Part IV groups together special critical editions, collections of criticism, general student introductions to the novel, teaching aids and guides, bibliographies, and biographies.
Martin, Terry J. 1998 0-7734-8240-7 120 pages This study analyzes an innovative rhetorical strategy employed in certain of the most challenging and frequently misunderstood stories of the American Renaissance, including ‘Young Goodman Brown,’ ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ and ‘Benito Cereno.’ In these stories, the reader is rhetorically beguiled into sharing the point of view of a character who is self-deluded and implicated in crime, yet whose true nature is never explicitly revealed, except through the works’ latent symbolic structure. Although the study draws on the insights of previous scholarship, it seeks to offer original readings of these stories, identifying them as a significant sub-genre of the modern short story.
Deamer, Robert Glen 1990 0-88946-163-5 232 pages Studies American writers, American culture, and the American dream in terms of myths of region, as dramatized in the lives and writings of major American authors. Place-myths are made to come alive by showing how they are dramatized in these authors' lives and the writings. The final section of the book focuses on the equally important American sense or experience of the loss of place.