Nathaniel Hawthorne : Collected Novels: Fanshawe, The Scarlet

Nathaniel Hawthorne : Collected Novels: Fanshawe, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, The Marble Faun (Library of America)

Here, in one Library of America volume, are all five of Hawthorneâ€™s world-famous novels. Written in a richly suggestive style that seems remarkably contemporary, they are permeated by his own history as well as Americaâ€™s.

InÂ The House of the Seven Gables, for example, Hawthorne alludes to his ancestorâ€™s involvement in the Salem witch trials, as he follows the fortunes of two rival families, the Maules and the Pyncheons. The novel moves across 150 years of American history, from an ancestral crime condoned by Puritan theocracy to reconciliation and a new beginning in the bustling Jacksonian era.

Considered Hawthorneâ€™s greatest work,Â The Scarlet Letter is a dramatic allegory of the social consequences of adultery and the subversive force of personal desire in a community of laws. The transgression of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale; the innate lawlessness of their bastard child, Pearl; and the torturous jealousy of the husband Roger Chillingworth eventually erupt through the stern reserve of Puritan Boston.Â The Scarlet LetterÂ engages the moral and romantic imagination of readers who ponder the question of sexual freedom and its place in the social world.

FanshaweÂ is an engrossing apprentice work that Hawthorne published anonymously and later sought to suppress. Written during his undergraduate years at Bowdoin College, it is a tragic romance of an ascetic scholarâ€™s love for a merchantâ€™s daughter.

The Blithedale RomanceÂ is a novel about the perils, which Hawthorne knew first-hand, of living in a utopian community. The utilitarian reformer Hollingsworth, the reticent narrator Miles Coverdale, the unearthly Priscilla, and the sensuous Zenobia (purportedly modeled on Margaret Fuller) act out a drama of love and rejection, idealism and chicanery, millennial hope and suicidal despair on an experimental commune in rural Massachusetts.

The Marble Faun, Hawthorneâ€™s last finished novel, uses Italian landscapes where sunlight gives way to mythological shadings as a background for mysteries of identity and murder. Its two young Americans, Kenyon and Hilda, become caught up in the disastrous passion of Donatello, an ingenuous nobleman, for the beautiful, mysterious Miriam, a woman trying to escape her past.

LIBRARY OF AMERICAÂ is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nationâ€™s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, Americaâ€™s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Country USA
Brand Library of America
Manufacturer Library of America
Binding Hardcover
ItemPartNumber 9780940450080
Color Black
ReleaseDate 1983-04-15
UnitCount 1
EANs 9780940450080

Country	USA
Brand	Library of America
Manufacturer	Library of America
Binding	Hardcover
ItemPartNumber	9780940450080
Color	Black
ReleaseDate	1983-04-15
UnitCount	1
EANs	9780940450080

Nathaniel Hawthorne : Collected Novels: Fanshawe, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, The Marble Faun (Library of America)

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