4 Nathaniel Hawthorne.ppt

Nathaniel Hawthorne Dark Romanticism Hao Guilian, Ph.D. Yunnan Normal University Spring, 2011 Historical background (1) Americans had always produced a vital literary response to their experience: the Native Americans, the Puritans, the planters, the revolutionaries, the early Romantics. A convenient historical marker is Emersons stirring lecture The American Scholar (1837), often called Americas intellectual declaration of independence. Increasingly, American writers, many of them directly inspired by Emerson, began to free themselves from European models. Historical background (2) During a relatively few years, concentrating around Boston and the village of Concord, a number of writers appeared whom we now think of as classic. Their work has for many readers a vitality and originality that endures, that transcends time and place. They produced work that has a scope and a depth that still reach us, still inspire us, still make us ask the great questions and face the most mysterious of realities. At times this literature celebrates the American, even the human, spirit. At times it criticizes the easy optimism that also marked the first half of the nineteenth century. Nathaniel Hawthorne was among the most important. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804—1864) An American novelist and short story writer. As a fifth-generation American of English descent, he was born in Salem, Massachusetts, a wealthy seaport north of Boston that specialized in East India trade, as Nathaniel Hathorne. He later changed his name to Hawthorne, adding a w to dissociate from relatives including John Hathorne, a judge during the Salem Witch Trials. Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College and graduated in 1825; his classmates included future president Franklin Pierce and future poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Much of Hawthornes writing centers around New England, many works featuring moral allegories with a Puritan inspiration. His fiction works are considered part of the Romantic movement and, mor