Hawthorne's Early Narrative Art (Studies in American Literature)

This study focuses on transatlantic historical aesthetic debates which informed Hawthorne's literary and philosophical education at Bowdoin College, as well as his subsequent self-designed programme of reading at the Salem Athenaeum, showing the way in which Hawthorne's early conception of narrative art and the central importance of the narrative persona grew out of his education in the 18th-century Anglo-Scottish literary theorists.