The School of Hawthorne

Front Cover
Oxford University Press, 1990 M02 22 - 267 pages
In The School of Hawthorne, Brodhead uses Hawthorne as a prime example of how literary traditions are made, not born. Under Brodhead's scrutiny, the Hawthorne tradition opens out onto a wide array of subjects, many of which have received little previous attention. He offers a detailed account of Hawthorne's life in American letters, showing how authors as varied as Melville, Howells, James, and Faulkner have learned from Hawthorne's model while all the while changing the terms in which he has been read. As he traces Hawthorne's continued life among his heirs, Brodhead also reflects on the ways in which writers receive and resist official tradition, how their work is conditioned by the institutionalized pasts that surround them, and how they go about creating new traditions to counter existing ones. An important contribution to literary history, The School of Hawthorne also establishes new ways in which literary history itself can be understood.
 

Contents

Hawthorne and Tradition
3
Hawthorne Melville and the Fiction of Prophecy
17
Manufacturing You Into a Personage Hawthorne the Canon and the Institutionalization of American Literature
48
Late Hawthorne or The Woes of the Immortals
67
Howells Literary History and the Realist Vocation
81
Henry James Tradition and the Work of Writing
104
James in the Beginning
121
James Realism and the Politics of Style
140
Late James The Lost Art of the Late Style
166
The Modernization of Tradition
201
Notes
217
Index
249
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