南开大学 外国语学院 美国文学课件Nathaniel_Hawthorne.ppt

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)  Works Twice-Told Tales 1837 Mosses from an Old Manse 1843 The Scarlet Letter 1850 The House of the Seven Gables 1851 The Blithedale Romance 1852 The Marble Faun 1860 “Young Goodman Brown” “The Minister’s Black Veil” “Dr. Rappacini’s Daughter” Life Hawthorne was born in Salem Massachusetts. Some of his ancestors were men of prominence in the Puritan theocracy of seventeenth-century New England. One of them was a colonial magistrate, notorious for his part in the persecution of the Quakers, and another was a judge at the Salem Witchcraft Trial in 1692. When Nathaniel was four, his father died on a voyage in Surinam, Dutch Guinea, but maternal relatives recognized his literary talent and financed his education at Bowdoin College. Among his classmates were many of the important literary and political figures of the day: writer Horatio Bridge, future Senator Jonathan Ciley, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and future President Franklin Pierce. These prominent friends supplied Hawthorne with government employment in the lean times, allowing him time to bloom as an author. Like James Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne was extremely concerned with conventionality; his first pseudonymously published short stories imitated Sir Walter Scott, as did his 1828 self-published Fanshawe. Hawthorne later formally withdrew most of this early work, discounting it as the work of inexperienced youth. From 1836 to 1844 the Boston-centered Transcendentalist movement, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, was an important force in New England intellectual circles. The Transcendentalists believed that human existence transcended the sensory realm, and rejected formalism in favor of individual responsibility. Hawthornes fiancée Sophia Peabody drew him into the newness, and in 1841 Hawthorne invested $1500 in the Brook Farm Utopian Community, leaving disillusioned within a year. His later works show some Transcen