A friend and associate of the Transcendentalists in Concord, Nathaniel Hawthorne has rarely been taken seriously as a writer interested in the natural world. This book seeks to redress this omission by elucidating the sense of environmentality that emanates from Hawthorne's romances and other writings. Hawthorne's sense of kinship with the natural world runs deep in his work, particularly when his fiction is examined alongside his voluminous notebooks. Rethinking Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nature also contributes to the growing scholarly work aiming to illuminate Hawthorne as a writer deeply engaged in the issues of his day, particularly involving the environment, rather than an author simply interested in reinterpreting colonial history. Today's readers stand to gain a rich new understanding of Hawthorne by reassessing Hawthorne's attitude toward the natural world.
Autorentext
Steven Petersheim is associate professor of American literature at Indiana University East and coeditor of Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Ecological Awareness of Early Scribes of Nature.
Inhalt
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Nature of Hawthorne's Pastoral Romances
Chapter One
Investigating Hawthorne's Nonfiction Nature Writing
Chapter Two
Observing "the Laboratory of Nature" in Hawthorne's Short Fiction
Chapter Three
Reading Nature and the Human Body in The Scarlet Letter
Chapter Four
Mapping Blood and Biology in The House of the Seven Gables
Chapter Five
Et in Arcadia Ego: Adaptation and Natural Limits in The Blithedale Romance
Chapter Six
Exploring the Ruins of the Human Animal in The Marble Faun
Chapter Seven
Postscript: Hawthorne's Unfinished Romances
Bibliography
About the Author