"This matter of the individual": Nathaniel Hawthorne's Individualism

Abstract:This essay revisits Nathaniel Hawthorne’s theory of history and its implications for his political imagination in light of recent reassessments of historicist methods across the humanities. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s concept of “worldliness” as well as recent literary critical reevaluations of historicism by Rita Felski and Jeffrey Insko, the essay traces Hawthorne’s literary and intellectual development in the late 1840s and early 1850s to highlight how Hawthorne was, in fact, highly critical of the kinds of teleological theories of history that scholars have long attributed to him. In doing so, the essay seeks not only to revise the notion that Hawthorne was an inherently conservative political thinker, but also to show how a more interdisciplinary engagement with moral and political thought can deepen literary studies’ understanding of the political implications involved in rethinking historicist approaches to literature.

Hawthorne, History, and Politics: A Reassessment

�� ��� “I am truly interested in this great field which opens before me and it is pleasant to be sure of a chance at half a hundred thousand readers,” Margaret Fuller, the newly-appointed literary editor of the New-York Tribune, the Whig organ established by Horace Greeley in November, 1841, wrote on March 9, 1845 to her brother Eugene, a lawyer associated with a New Orleans newspaper. Eugene had written to report that he had seen a review of Fuller’s recently-published Woman in the Nineteenth Century during a visit to an Arkansas town. The “great field” opening before Fuller was a new form of literary journalism, one devoted at once to social critique and extended discussions of books and ideas and aimed at the widest possible readership. Recognizing the power of the daily press both to sell books and to promote the discussion of important social questions, Fuller asked Eugene to place a notice of Woman in the Nineteenth Cen

"The Ultraism of the Day ": Greene's Boston Post, Hawthorne, Fuller, Melville, Stowe, and Literary Journalism in Antebellum America

Clinging to One Spot: Hawthorne's Native-Born Settlers

This study examines the relationship between writing and American identity in four works--William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, Herman Melville's Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun: Or The Romance of Monte Beni--by illuminating the difficulty that the narrator of each work has in constructing and maintaining his vision of American identity. For Bradford and Franklin, the analysis centers on their attempts to confront the historical complexities of American society--Bradford confronting the economic realities of colonialism, Franklin confronting the difficulty of organizing governance after the American Revolution. For Melville and Hawthorne, the analysis centers on their ironic but historically-based presentation of American identity through a self-interested or naive narrator, and on their texts' subsequent comments on the problems of American expansionism and slavery. Though not strictly a Bakhtinian analysis, this study employs Mikhail Bakhtin's categories of monological and dialogical discourse as a reference for showing how language and history help destabilize written constructions of American identity. In each work, a narrator creates American identity by suppressing or ignoring elements of American experience that subsequent events, or even events contemporary to the narrators, have proved to be of essential importance. When read retrospectively from our own point in time, these elements show their hidden presence in the narratives by disrupting their schemes for American identity. The appearance of these elements proves instructive about the works themselves, their times, their authors, and their relationships with each other. Each chapter addresses the problem of writing and American identity by describing a literary and historical basis for each construction of American identity, by identifying the suppressed elements of American experience in each construction, and by showing how knowledge of these elements affects both the narrator's construction of American identity and the way in which we read the narratives. Each chapter ends with a conclusion that attempts to resituate the works in relation to the increasing emphasis on social and political consciousness that affects American literary studies. 

God Keep Me From Ever Completing Anything: Problems of Writing and Identity in Four American Narratives.

During the summer of 1852, Nathaniel Hawthorne's two careers, as author and as Democratic politician, came together. Barely a month after Hawthorne completed The Blithedale Romance, his Bowdoin friend Franklin Pierce won the Democratic nomination for the presidency. Hawthorne quickly offered to write "the necessary biography" (Letters 545) but professed reluctance and mentioned another man more suited to the

The Two Lives of Franklin Pierce: Hawthorne, Political Culture, and the Literary Market

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The Two Lives of Franklin Pierce: Hawthorne, Political Culture, and the Literary Market