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Hawthorne’s Histories, Hawthorne’s World picks up Hawthorne where The Province of Piety left him, extending the historical and theological reading there developed of the early Puritan and revolutionary tales Hawthorne wrote in birthplace Salem on to the contemporary tales, sketches, essays, and finally four published romances based on his stays in Brook Farm, Boston, Concord, Lenox, Salem, Liverpool, and Rome.
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.
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
“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
Thirteen rich chapters on Hawthorne’s process of writing, his cultural sources, and his narratology. - Nathaniel Hawthorne Review
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).
Introduction: Here and Elsewhere; 1. Summons of the Past: Hawthorne and the Theme(s) of Puritanism; 2. Moments’ Monuments: Hawthorne’s Scenic of History; 3. “Certain Circumstances”: Hawthorne and the Interest of History; 4. The Teller and the Tale: A Note on Hawthorne’s Narrators; 5. “Life within the Life”: Sin and Self in Hawthorne’s New England; 6. A Better Mode of Evidence: The Transcendental Problem of Faith and Spirit; 7. “Artificial Fire”: Reading Melville (Re-)reading Hawthorne; 8. “Red Man’s Grave”: Art and Destiny in Hawthorne’s “Main-street”; 9. “Such Ancestors”: The Spirit of History in The Scarlet Letter; 10. Inheritance, Repetition. Complicity, Redemption: Theo-politics in The House of the Seven Gables; 11. “Inextricable Knot of Polygamy”: Transcendental Husbandry in Hawthorne’s Blithedale; 12. Innocence Abroad: Here and There in Hawthorne’s “Last Phase”.