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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 Ambrozy, Katarzyna Kuczma, Joseph Kuhn, David Malcolm, Marek Paryz, Janusz Semrau, Pawel Stachura, and Marek Wilczynski. 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.
List of contents
Content: Pawel Stachura: Drawing under the radar: «Earth's Holocaust» and truth in painting - Paulina Ambrozy: On the unconcealedness of the sketch in «The Prophetic Pictures» - Marek Paryz: Roger Malvin's corpse - Marek Wilczynski: Between memory and tradition; or, «Legends of the Province-House» - Joseph Kuhn: The Robin Molineux of Lionel Trilling - Janusz Semrau: What if «Wakefield» were (about) a woman? - Katarzyna Kuczma: Hawthorne's natural order of self-reflexivity - David Malcolm: Is there coherence and cohesion in the 1837 volume of Twice-told tales?
About the author
Janusz Semrau teaches American literature at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan and at the University of Social Sciences in Warsaw. He has authored several books and numerous papers on various aspects of American literature.
