Nathaniel Hawthorne's status as an artist rests as much on The Scarlet Letter as on his short fictions. It is both telling and appropriate that academic research in the short story should be dated to Mary Rohrberger's study Hawthorne and the Modern Short Story, published in 1966. The present volume adds to this discourse with contributions by Paulina Ambroży, Katarzyna Kuczma, Joseph Kuhn, David Malcolm, Marek Paryż, Janusz Semrau, Paweł Stachura, and Marek Wilczyński. Represented here are some of the most widely-known stories, such as «My Kinsman, Major Molineux», «Wakefield», «Roger Malvin's Burial», «Ethan Brand», «The Great Stone Face», and some of the less widely-known ones, such as «Legends of the Province-House», «The Haunted Mind», «The Threefold Destiny», «Foot-prints on the Sea-shore». The individual essays discuss Hawthorne's texts in quasi-generic terms, through some persistent American themes and motifs, as well as for their aesthetic, philosophical, and existential meanings. The readings draw ideological and theoretical support from the thought of Emerson, Hegel, Trilling, de Certeau, Freud, Heidegger, Lacan, and Derrida.

This book examines in detail some of Hawthorne's most important and most beloved stories.

Hawthorne was, with his own complicity, long described as a writer of unreal romances (as he preferred to call his novels) or "allegories of the heart" as he termed some of his short stories. The essays in this collection contribute to the turn in recent Hawthorne criticism which shows how deeply implicated in realism his writing was."--BOOK JACKET.

Presents a selection of fifteen short fiction stories by nineteenth-century American author Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The short fiction of a writer who helped to shape the course of American literature. With a determined commitment to the history of his native land, Nathaniel Hawthorne revealed, more incisively than any writer of his generation, the nature of a distinctly American consciousness. The pieces collected here deal with essentially American matters: the Puritan past, the Indians, the Revolution. But Hawthorne was highly - often wickedly - unorthodox in his account of life in early America, and his precisely constructed plots quickly engage the reader's imagination. Written in the 1820s, 30s, and 40s, these works are informed by themes that reappear in Hawthorne's longer works: The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance. And, as Michael J. Colacurcio points out in his excellent introduction, they are themes that are now deeply embedded in the American literary tradition.