New essays on Hawthorne's major tales

The American Novel series provides students of American literature with introductory critical guides to the great works of American literature. Each volume begins with a substantial introduction by a distinguished authority on the text, giving details of the work's composition, publication history, and contemporary reception, as well as a survey of the major critical trends and readings from first publication to the present. This overview is followed by a group of new essays, each specially commissioned from a leading scholar in the field, which together constitute a forum of interpretive methods and prominent contemporary ideas on the text. There are also helpful guides to further reading. Specifically designed for undergraduates, the series will be a powerful resource for anyone engaged in the critical analysis of major American novels and other important texts. New Essays on Hawthorne's Major Tales examines in detail some of Hawthorne's most important and most beloved stories such as "Young Goodman Brown," "Roger Malvin's Burial," "The Minister's Black Veil," "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," "Rappaccini's Daughter," and "Ethan Brand." The essayists make fresh attempts to probe the complex meanings of these much discussed works, utilizing a variety of contemporary critical methods. Michael Colacurcio argues for Hawthorne's interest in history; David Leverenz traces Hawthorne's mythopoetic interest in damnation and relates it to the tensions of Hawthorne's own time; Carol Bensick defends and admits the limitations of the identification of allusion in Hawthorne; Edgar Dryden explores Hawthorne's sense of traditional genre and relates it to modern hermeneutics; and Rita Gollin connects patterns of language with the psychological and biographic. Millicent Bell's introduction analyzes Hawthorne's early aspirations, places his writing in the context of contemporary audience expectations, and surveys the history of critical response to the tales from the writer's own time to our own.