Nathaniel Hawthorne, celebrated in his own day for sketches that now seem sentimental, came only gradually to be fully appreciated for what his friend Herman Melville diagnosed as the "power of blackness" in his fiction - the complex moral grappling with sin and guilt. By the 1850s, Hawthorne had already been accepted into the American canon, and since then, his works - especially The Scarlet Letter -- have remained ubiquitous in American culture. Along with this has come an explosion of Hawthorne criticism, from New Criticism, New Historicism, and Cultural Studies to queer theory, feminist...
Nathaniel Hawthorne, celebrated in his own day for sketches that now seem sentimental, came only gradually to be fully appreciated for what his friend...
Episodic and disconnected, much of postmodern fiction mirrors the world as quantum theorists describe it, according to Samuel Chase Coale. In Quirks of the Quantum, Coale shows how the doubts, misgivings, and ambiguities reflected in the postmodern American novel have been influenced by the metaphors and models of quantum theory. Coale explains the basic facets of quantum theory in lay terms and then applies them to a selection of texts, including Don DeLillo's Underworld, Joan Didion's Democracy, and Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. Using a new approach to...
Episodic and disconnected, much of postmodern fiction mirrors the world as quantum theorists describe it, according to Samuel Chase Coale. In Qu...
