Hawthorne’s Histories, Hawthorne’s World: From Salem to Somewhere Else

Hawthorne’s Literary History picks up Hawthorne where The Province of Piety left him, extending the historical and theological reading there developed of the early Puritan and revolutionary tales Hawthorne wrote in birthplace Salem on to the contemporary tales, sketches, essays, and finally four published romances based on his stays in Brook Farm, Boston, Concord, Lenox, Salem, Liverpool, and Rome.

A collection of essays rather than a single, continuously argued monograph, Hawthorne’s Literary History collects together the essays Professor Colacurcio has written on Hawthorne since the publication of his ground-breaking Province of Piety, elaborating and refining his analyses of how Hawthorne’s most memorable early tales do history, but proceeding then to explore the later productions of that author’s distinguished career. The result, in Colacurcio’s patient analysis, is something like Hawthorne’s history of his own times.