Hawthorne Introduction
Hawthorne Introduction | | | -------------------------------------------------
表單的頂端…. My Kinsman, Major Molineux” [and] “Young Goodman Brown”: both probe the individual’s complex inner life and interrelationships with society, warning against simplistic moral judgments and challenging pious assumptions about Puritanism and revolutionary America. Both present eruptions of what has been suppressed; and the narrator, who asks if the guilt-obsessed Brown had “only dreamed a wild dream of of witch-meeting” and answers “Be it so if you will,” requires the reader to participate in moral judgment. For the castles of Gothic romance, Hawthorne substituted the American wilderness and the wilderness of the mind. As in a dream, his fiction pushes beyond surface reality, conveying knowledge that resists complete understanding. For more than a century, despite changes in perspective and methodology, the verdict on Hawthorne’s stature has remained virtually constant. For Henry James, Hawthorne was a great imaginative writer who was limited by the thinness of American culture and sometimes trapped into allegory; early twentieth-century critics saw him as a dreamer of dreamlike fiction and the heir of Puritan gloom; mid-century” new critics” concentrated on the symbolism and the organic unity of his fiction and analyzed recurring character types and themes. More recently, Hawthorne has been studied by poststructuralists, feminists, and new literary historians. Reader-response theorists show how Hawthorne’s texts “create” his readers;semioticians examine such signifiers as the scarlet letter; deconstructionists read his texts as hieroglyphs that resist final interpretation; and his conception of romance and his rhetorical performance and reassessed. Scholars ask how he used history, how family constellations shaped him and how marketplace values controlled him, and trace his status as a literary celebrity from his time to ours. He is understood as a self-aware writer who
表單的頂端…. My Kinsman, Major Molineux” [and] “Young Goodman Brown”: both probe the individual’s complex inner life and interrelationships with society, warning against simplistic moral judgments and challenging pious assumptions about Puritanism and revolutionary America. Both present eruptions of what has been suppressed; and the narrator, who asks if the guilt-obsessed Brown had “only dreamed a wild dream of of witch-meeting” and answers “Be it so if you will,” requires the reader to participate in moral judgment. For the castles of Gothic romance, Hawthorne substituted the American wilderness and the wilderness of the mind. As in a dream, his fiction pushes beyond surface reality, conveying knowledge that resists complete understanding. For more than a century, despite changes in perspective and methodology, the verdict on Hawthorne’s stature has remained virtually constant. For Henry James, Hawthorne was a great imaginative writer who was limited by the thinness of American culture and sometimes trapped into allegory; early twentieth-century critics saw him as a dreamer of dreamlike fiction and the heir of Puritan gloom; mid-century” new critics” concentrated on the symbolism and the organic unity of his fiction and analyzed recurring character types and themes. More recently, Hawthorne has been studied by poststructuralists, feminists, and new literary historians. Reader-response theorists show how Hawthorne’s texts “create” his readers;semioticians examine such signifiers as the scarlet letter; deconstructionists read his texts as hieroglyphs that resist final interpretation; and his conception of romance and his rhetorical performance and reassessed. Scholars ask how he used history, how family constellations shaped him and how marketplace values controlled him, and trace his status as a literary celebrity from his time to ours. He is understood as a self-aware writer who