The antebellum period has long been identified with the belated emergence of a truly national literature. And yet, as Meredith L. McGill argues, a mass market for books in this period was built and ...sustained through what we would call rampant literary piracy: a national literature developed not despite but because of the systematic copying of foreign works. Restoring a political dimension to accounts of the economic grounds of antebellum literature, McGill unfolds the legal arguments and political struggles that produced an American "culture of reprinting" and held it in place for two crucial decades.In this culture of reprinting, the circulation of print outstripped authorial and editorial control. McGill examines the workings of literary culture within this market, shifting her gaze from first and authorized editions to reprints and piracies, from the form of the book to the intersection of book and periodical publishing, and from a national literature to an internally divided and transatlantic literary marketplace. Through readings of the work of Dickens, Poe, and Hawthorne, McGill seeks both to analyze how changes in the conditions of publication influenced literary form and to measure what was lost as literary markets became centralized and literary culture became stratified in the early 1850s.American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853delineates a distinctive literary culture that was regional in articulation and transnational in scope, while questioning the grounds of the startlingly recent but nonetheless powerful equation of the national interest with the extension of authors' rights.
This book presents a literary/biographical study of Nathaniel Hawthorne's full career. It 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 use of Hawthorne’s notebooks and letters as well as nearly all of his important fiction, this 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.
Practicing romance Millington, Richard H; Millington, Richard H
2014., 20140701, 2014, 1992, Letnik:
1212
eBook
Practicing Romance sets out to re-tell the story of Hawthorne's career, arguing that he is best understood as a cultural analyst of extraordinary acuity, ambitious to reshape--in a sense to cure--the ...community he addresses. Through readings attentive to narrative strategy and alert to the emerging middle-class culture that was his audience, the book defines and describes Hawthornian Romance in a new way: not, in customary fashion, as the definitive instance of a peculiarly American genre, but as a narrative practice designed to expose and restage the covert drama that affiliates us to our community. Hawthorne's fiction thus recovers for its readers, through the interpretive independence it teaches, a freer, more lucid, more critical relation to the community we inhabit, and the cultural engagement romance enacts in turn rescues Hawthorne from the confining marginality that the writer's career had threatened to confer. From the book's distinctive account of his narrative tactics, especially his deployment of the voices and attitudes--authoritarian or democratic, entrapping or freeing--that give shape to his ideological terrain, Hawthorne emerges as a daring reinventor of the novel's cultural role.
Originally published in 1992.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
As the author of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne has been established as a major writer of the nineteenth century and the most prominent chronicler of New England and its colonial history. ...This introductory book for students coming to Hawthorne for the first time outlines his life and writings in a clear and accessible style. Leland S. Person also explains some of the significant cultural and social movements that influenced Hawthorne's most important writings: Puritanism, Transcendentalism and Feminism. The major works, including The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, as well as Hawthorne's important short stories and non-fiction, are analysed in detail. The book also includes a brief history and survey of Hawthorne scholarship, with special emphasis on recent studies. Students of nineteenth-century American literature will find this a rewarding and engaging introduction to this remarkable writer.
North West Branch Griffiths, Pam
The Gaskell journal,
01/2023, Letnik:
37
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The Manchester Histories Festival was held at Gorton Monastery in June. The theme of Brook Street Chapel's Heritage Days in September was 'Unitarian Inventors' so we decided to feature Elizabeth ...Gaskell as an inventor of stories which was an interesting interpretation. The last Manchester meeting of the year was an in-depth talk by Frank Galvin on his involvement in sourcing items for the restoration of Elizabeth Gaskell's House, turning it into the magnificent house that we see today.
Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of America's most noted and highly praised writers, and a key figure in US literature. Although, he struggled to become an acknowledged author for most parts of his life, ...his work "stands in the limelight of the American literary consciousness" (Graham 5). For he is a direct descendant of Massachusetts Bay colonists in the Puritan era of the 17th and 18th century, New England served as a lifelong preoccupation for Hawthorne, and inspired many of his best-known stories. Hence, in order to understand the author and his work, it is crucial to apprehend the historical background from which his stories arose. The awareness of the Puritan legacy in Hawthorne's time, and their Calvinist beliefs which contributed to the establishment of American identity, serve as a basis for fathoming the intention behind Hawthorne's writings. His forefathers' concept of wilderness became an important part of their religious life, and in many of Hawthorne's tales, nature can be perceived as an active agent for the plot and the moral message. Therefore, it is indispensable to consider the development behind the Puritan perception, as well as the prevailing opinion on nature during the writer's lifetime. After the historical background has been depicted, the author himself is focused. His ambiguous character and non-persistent lifestyle are the source of many themes which can be retrieved from his works. Thus, understanding the man behind the stories is necessary in order to analyze the tales themselves. Seclusion, nature, and Puritanism are constantly recurring topics in the author's life and work. To become familiar with Hawthorne's relation to nature, his ancestors, and religion, it is essential to understand the vast amount of symbols his stories. His stories will be brought into focus, and will be analyzed on the basis of the historical and
biographical facts, and further, his particular style and purpose will be taken into consideration.The second part of this book analyzes two of the author's most eminent and esteemed works, namely 'Young Goodman Brown' and 'The Scarlet Letter' in terms of nature symbolism and the underlying moral intention. Further, it is examined to which extent the images correspond to the formerly explained historical facts, and Hawthorne's emphasized characteristic features. The comparison of the two works focuses on the didactic purpose for in all of his works, Hawthorne's aim was to give a lesson. Thus, it will provide an in-depth understanding of the author's intentions and his utilization of Puritanism and nature perception.
Through textual analysis, this paper investigates free-thinking and its implications on human existence from an Existential perspective in Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic The Scarlet Letter. It focuses ...on the presence, freedom, and choice of individuals. The study looks into how our activities are linked to our personal freedom. It investigates the factors that influence man's behaviours and beliefs, as well as how he reacts when his freedom is curtailed. The study's major goal is to look at how individuals might discover the reality of life via free thought and how existentialism is represented in the novel. The study discovered that free thinking promotes the use of intellectual inquiry against the enforced authority of historical institutions such as religion and politics, and that it may benefit all aspects of man's existence. It was also discovered that free thought leads to self-sufficiency and independence. Scholars will be able to see this novel in a new light as a result of our research.
The visual world and its representation figure large in the romances as well as in the life of the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne (PI 1). In The Howe of Seven Gables, published in 1851, one of ...the chief characters is a photographer, and, in the last of his great 'romances', The Marble Faun, the whole plot is built around a sculpture. However, Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, in their Taste and the Antique, rap Hawthorne over the knuckles for the unreliability of his aesthetic judgements, and for not being able to make up his mind whether the Medici Venus is a sublime classic or a botched version of some finer original. In Hawthorne's brushes with the sculptural world attention has focused, rather to his detriment, on the period he spent in Italy between January 1858 and May 1859. There are two obvious reasons for this. One is that, in his travel notebooks, he represents himself as undergoing a sort of initiation into the mysteries of the art, through contact with lauded examples from antiquity, and profiting from the advice of such luminaries as Anna Jameson, Hiram Powers, William Wetmore Story and John Gibson.
