The School of Hawthorne

ISBN-13: 9780195060706 / Angielski / Miękka / 1990 / 272 str.

Richard H. Brodhead

Opis

In The School of Hawthorne, Brodhead uses Hawthorne as a prime example of how literary traditions are made, not born. Under Brodhead's scrutiny, the Hawthorne tradition opens out onto a wide array of subjects, many of which have received little previous attention. He offers a detailed account of Hawthorne's life in American letters, showing how authors as varied as Melville, Howells, James, and Faulkner have learned from Hawthorne's model while all the while changing the terms in which he has been read. As he traces Hawthorne's continued life among his heirs, Brodhead also reflects on the ways in which writers receive and resist official tradition, how their work is conditioned by the institutionalized pasts that surround them, and how they go about creating new traditions to counter existing ones. An important contribution to literary history, The School of Hawthorne also establishes new ways in which literary history itself can be understood.

Recenzje

`Brodhead's book is a very good addition to Hawthorne criticism as well as to the theory of how literary tradition is made and remade...will be a welcomed text in graduate and major university libraries.' Choice `Richard Brodhead...proves here once again that he is a brilliant reader and a brilliant writer. In fact, one is almost inclined to distrust a prose so consistently and simultaneously dense and lucid and so studded with witty and wise phrases and sentences...The School of Hawthorne is a joy to read. But what will make it an important and enduring contribution to the study of American literature and culture is the wisdom of its argument...Richard Brodhead will become (dare one say it?) a `classic' interpreter of American literature and of its complex history.' New England Quarterly