美国文学之Hawthorne.pptVIP

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) July 4th,1804; 1821-1825, Bowdoin College (Longfellow, Franklin Pierce); 1837, Twice-Told Tales; 1853-1857, consul in Liverpool; died in 1864. Works The Scarlet Letter (1850) The House of Seven Gables (1851) The Blithedale Romance (1852) The Marble Faun (1860) Twice-Told Tales(1837and 1842) Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) Hawthorne’s Sense of Evil 1) evil being the core of human life(Vs. Emerson’s optimism) “Earthy Holocaust” “Young Goodman Brown” “The Minister’s Black Veil” 2)“the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones” The House of the Seven Gables (Colonel Pyncheon Vs. Mathew Maul) Marble Faun (Donatello and Miriam) 3) Evil educates. The Marble Faun (Donatello and Miriam) 4) Intellectual characters as possible source of evil “There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. come, devil!for to thee is this world given”(Young Goodman Brown) “如果我是为了不可告人的罪恶而隐藏自己的面孔，那么请问，难道有什么人可以不这样做呢？” (The Minister’s Black Veil) Hawthornes literary theory runs as follows:  He believed that romance was the predestined form of American narrative. romance: breaking the probabilities; abstract and high-born characters; place and time to distance; symbolism, myth and allegory novel: realistic; fully developed characters of middle-class level; realistic reference to time and place ……The latter form of composition [that is,the Novel] is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience. The former[that is, the Romance]…has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation. —preface to The House of the Seven Gables reasons for him to write romances instead of novels: 1) “the poverty of materials” in America. “There is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight.” A