Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Contemporary Reviews

by John L. Idol, Jr, Buford Jones, M. Thomas Inge

Overview

From the self-withdrawn Fanshawe through the posthumously issued Dr. Grimshaw's Secret, this compilation of reviews and notices traces Nathaniel Hawthorne's rise from obscurity to world renown as a writer placed in the ranks of Carlyle, Dickens, and Shakespeare. Reviews by Henry Fothergill Chorley, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Edwin Whipple, Henry James, Edith Simcox, William Dean Howells, and many others respond to Hawthorne's tales, romances, notebooks, and fragmentary works in efforts to capture and define the nature of Hawthorne's mind and the quality of his art.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521391429
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/29/1994
Series:	American Critical Archives , #4
Pages:	564
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.61(h) x 1.54(d)

Table of Contents

Series editor's preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction; A note on the selections; 1. Fanshawe (1828); 2.Tales and sketches in The Token and other annual or periodical publications, 1831–1837; 3. Twice-Told Tales (1837–1838); 4. The Gentle Boy (1839); 5. Grandfather's Chair, Famous Old People, and Liberty Tree (1841); 6. Biographical Stories for Children (1842); 7. Twice-Told Tales (second edition, 1842); 8. Mosses from an Old Manse (1846); 9. The Scarlet Letter (1850); 10. True Stories from History and Biography (1850); 11. The House of Seven Gables (1851); 12. Twice-told Tales (reissue, 1851); 13.Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (1851); 14. The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales (1851); 15. The Blithedale Romance (1852); 16. Life of Franklin Pierce (1852); 17. Tanglewood Tales (1853); 18. Mosses from an Old Manse (reissue, 1854); 19. The Marble Faun (Transformation in England) (1860); 20. Our Old Home (1863); 21. Pansie (1864); 22. Passages from the American Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1868); 23. Passages from the American Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1870); 24. Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1871); 25. Septimius Felton; or, The Elixir of Life (1872); 26. Fanshawe and The Dolliver Romance (1876); 27. Dr. Grimshaw's Secret (1882); Retrospective and general-assessment essays, 1841–1879; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"All libraries serving serious students of literature should have these volumes." Q. Grigg, Choice

"As well as providing a literary resource for scholars, Nathaniel Hawthorne: The contemporary reviews offers important evidence of how Hawthorne achieved his canonical status in American literature." Peter Shaw, Times Literary Supplement

"The selections—many of the best from newpapers and probably unknown even to most Hawthorne specialists—are without a doubt worth the high price of admission...The twenty-page introduction is intelligent, and the selections frequently thought-provoking..." Nineteenth-Century Literature

"...provides a valuable resource of primary material on a writer who once styled himself the 'obscurest man in American letters.'" Val Gough, Journal of American Studies

From the Publisher