The terms “Romanticism” and “Romantic” should not be confused with the popular meaning, as pertaining to love. “Romanticism” derives from the genre of the medieval romance, a heroic narrative emphasizing the importance of chivalry and valor in battle. Many Romantic… Read More ›
The term Gothicism in its literary meaning derives not from the Goths, an ancient Germanic tribe, but from the sense of Gothic as medieval. This literary movement may be seen as a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment and… Read More ›
“Young Goodman Brown,” initially appearing in Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) as both a bleak romance and a moral allegory, has maintained its hold on contemporary readers as a tale of initiation, alienation, and evil. Undoubtedly one of Nathaniel… Read More ›
In a thought-provoking allegory written nearly two years after “The Birth-Mark,” Nathaniel Hawthorne uses a first-person narrator to introduce “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” This nameless narrator tells the reader that he translated the story, originally entitled “Beatrice: ou la Belle Empoisonneuse” (Beatrice:… Read More ›
A mendicant, a hedonist, a ruined politician, and a scandalous widow all answer the summons of their friend, a doctor, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1837 tale “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment.” He calls these ageing friends to his study to participate in an… Read More ›
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reading in American colonial history confirmed his basically ambivalent attitude toward the American past, particularly the form that Puritanism took in the New England colonies. Especially interested in the intensity of the Puritan-Cavalier rivalry, the Puritan inclination to… Read More ›
The term “fantasy” refers to all works of fiction that attempt neither the realism of the realistic novel nor the “conditional realism” of science fiction. Among modern critics, the primacy of the realistic novel is taken for granted. Realistic novels… Read More ›
By the end of the nineteenth century, writers interested in exploring supernatural themes had abandoned the mode of gothic fiction pioneered by eighteenth century English novelist Horace Walpole. Walpole and his imitators had exploited such props as medieval ruins and… Read More ›
The gothic novel is a living tradition, a form that enjoys great popular appeal while provoking harsh critical judgments. It began with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765), then traveled through Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin,… Read More ›
Central to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s romances is his idea of a “neutral territory,” described in the Custom House sketch that precedes The Scarlet Letter as a place “somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may… Read More ›
The French Revolution of 1789 marked a watershed for the future of Europe, a fact keenly discerned by writers on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Irving Babbitt and Matthew Arnold. Not only did that Revolution initiate the political… Read More ›
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