No description available.

No description available.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate various religious elements in Nathainel Hawthorne's life in relation to his career as a literary artist. The moral seriousness of this author at once strikes us as being something closely akin to religious sentiment, but he refused to endorse any specific dogma or to subscribe to any one organized faith. We know from his work that he had a religion, but his silence leaves ample room for conjecture if we wish to "label" him, or decide which of those religions that he contemplated was most congenial to his nature.

Hawthorne's metafiction, fabulation, and hermeneutical semiotics are investigated in the tales and in all the novels in chronological order, including his unfinished works.

This thesis encompasses a twofold purpose. On the one hand, it seeks to explore and to formulate a definition of the concept of "place" and what is meant by the words "sense of place" in fiction. Within this purview, the thesis also distinguishes between the concept of place and the fictional technique of setting. On the other hand, the study provides an analysis of Hawthorne's work based upon the implications ensuing from a consideration of place. While most of Hawthorn's familiar short stories and novels are discussed briefly and referred to where appropriate, the bulk of the study provides in-depth analyses of several short stories and sketches which have received little critical attention. The short pieces discussed in greatest detail are as follows: "My Visit to Niagara," "Foot-prints on the Sea-shore," "The Old Manse," "The Lily's Quest," and "Main-Street." These pieces were selcted because they focus on "places" directly, because they require critical attention, and because they shed light on several of Hawthorn 's major works. The overall concern with the concept of place is deemed important by the author because the concept figures so prominently in Hawthorn 's work and thus serves as a way of enhancing the reader's understanding of Hawthorne's mind and art.

This paper explores the role of children and childhood in Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction. Moreover, it asserts that the child and childhood are keys to a better understanding of Hawthorne's fiction.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine in selected tales and romances Hawthorne's intent and the effectiveness of his transmutation of American colonial and Revolutionary War history in his fiction. This study examines the most important of Hawthorne's original sources. While indicating the relationship between fictional and historical accounts as necessary to a study of Hawthorne's romantic transmutation of history, this thesis further investigates Hawthorne's artistic reasons for altering events of the past.

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Nathaniel Hawthorne lived and wrote in an age of reform efforts, and the progressive movement with which he was most familiar was Transcendentalism. However, he was not sympathetic with Emerson's idealism, a sentiment which comes out in his fiction in way of critique. Throughout Hawthorne's work there is an emphasis on human limitation, in stark contrast to the optimism that characterized his time a "materialist" response to idealism (as defined by Emerson in "The Transcendentalist"). And one important vehicle of this critique of human possibility is his shrewd use of biblical motif particularly the tropes of Eden and the Promised Land, which were adopted by the Transcendentalists. Although these allusions can be traced through much of Hawthorne's work, they are especially apparent in two novels: The Blithedale Romance (1852) and The Scarlet Letter (1850). Hawthorne exposes the irony behind the use of these biblical motifs by the Blithedale community (in their effort to create a utopian society) and the Puritan community, which looked to its religious leaders as the embodiment of its ideals. / Graduation date: 1999

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 225-232). Also available on the Internet.