Hawthorne's Histories, Hawthorne's World - (Anthem Nineteenth-Century) by Michael J Colacurcio (Hardcover)

About the Book

Hawthorne's Histories, Hawthorne's World collects together the essays Professor Colacurcio has written on Hawthorne since the publication of his ground-breaking Province of Piety, elaborating and refining his analyses of how Hawthorne's most memorable early tales "do history," but proceeding then to explore the later productions of that author's distinguished career.

Book Synopsis

A collection of essays rather than a single, continuously argued monograph, Hawthorne's Histories, Hawthorne's World collects together the essays Professor Colacurcio has written on Hawthorne since the publication of his ground-breaking Province of Piety, elaborating and refining his analyses of how Hawthorne's most memorable early tales "do history," but proceeding then to explore the later productions of that author's distinguished career. The result, in Colacurcio's patient analysis, is something like Hawthorne's history of his own times. To be sure, The Scarlet Letter returns to the rich theme we know as "the matter of the Puritans," but rides up from a moment, and clearly implies, the vibrant but troubled women's movement; and, imagining the world Hester Prynne as good as predicted, The Blithedale Romance deepens the sensitive but cautious inquiry. Contemporaneous too is the subject of The House of the Seven Gables which, stopping just short of discovering that property is theft, dares to inquire into the murky sources of aristocratic wealth and privilege in his present New England. From the moment between the early tales and the three American romances, the tales and sketches written at the Old Manse in Concord reveal Hawthorne's fascinated and troubled response to that swirl of contemporary reform movements which historians know as "Freedom's Ferment"; several encounter Emerson explicitly, and even more question the life-implications of "idealism as it appears in 1842," as Emerson had defined his Transcendentalism. From the so-called "Last Phase" of Hawthorne's career, Colacurcio presents, along with some remarks "Chiefly About War Matters" (1862) and, more briefly still, the unfinished romances, a major reading of the work Hawthorne called Our Old Home (1863); growing out of the Notebooks the author kept while serving as American Consul to Liverpool in the mid-1850s, this now nostalgic, now fierce mix of excursion and critique reveals a great deal about Hawthorne's social intelligence, and about his biases. Finally, Colacurcio offers a patient but somewhat resistant reading of The Marble Faun, a major effort to identify the "puritanic" element in the developing American identity but revealing, at the same time, an unsteady Narrator's increasing hesitance about the epistemology of the "Romance." Literary genius beginning to doubt its gift.

Review Quotes

"In Hawthorne's Histories, Hawthorne's World, the leading scholar of Hawthorne and his place in early American literature and thought extends the scope of his magisterial book The Province of Piety in a number of new directions. Taken together, the two books give us the most complete and incisive critical assessment of Hawthorne we are ever likely to have." --Eric J. Sundquist, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, Johns Hopkins University, USA

"The combination of magisterial command of both primary and secondary sources, stylistic flair and incendiary originality is more than rare, even singular. Professor Colacurcio advances a distinguished career with his reflections on one of the five big men featured by F. O. Matthiessen, he whom the MLA's last polling of college and university Americanists ranked the most important of nineteenth-century US authors. Colacurcio's Hawthorne's Histories will be the one all future commentators will have to consult before attempting to add to the considerable archive of Hawthorne criticism." --R. C. De Prospo, Ernest A. Howard Chair of English Literature, Chair, American Studies, Washington College, USA

In this new volume, he discusses Hawthorne's career more comprehensively and adds a compelling reading of the two "Allegories of the Heart" in Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)--Choice

Michael Colacurcio brings to this book his wicked wit, keen intelligence and more knowledge of Hawthorne's writing, sources and historical imagination than anyone else alive. The result is a masterful overview of Hawthorne's multi-phased literary corpus--from Salem's ghosts of the past all the way to Rome and The Marble Faun." --John Gatta, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English Emeritus, The University of the South - Sewanee, USA

Thirteen rich chapters on Hawthorne's process of writing, his cultural sources, and his narratology. - Nathaniel Hawthorne Review

About the Author

Distinguished Professor of English at UCLA and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Michael J. Colacurcio is the author of, inter alia, The Province of Piety (1984), Doctrine and Difference (1997), Godly Letters (2007), Emerson and Other Minds (2020) and, most recently, the sequels Doctrine and Difference II: Readings in Classic American Literature (2021) Doctrine and Difference III: The Thematic Scale of Classic American Literature (2023), and Doctrine and Difference IV (in progress), and Puritanism in American Literature (in progress).