As the author of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne has been established as a major writer of the nineteenth century and the most prominent chronicler of New England and its colonial history. This introductory book for students coming to Hawthorne for the first time outlines his life and writings in a clear and accessible style. Leland S. Person also explains some of the significant cultural and social movements that influenced Hawthorne's most important writings: Puritanism, Transcendentalism and Feminism. The major works, including The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, as well as Hawthorne's important short stories and non-fiction, are analysed in detail. The book also includes a brief history and survey of Hawthorne scholarship, with special emphasis on recent studies. Students of nineteenth-century American literature will find this a rewarding and engaging introduction to this remarkable writer.

This second edition also includes: revised and expanded explanatory footnotes, a new preface and a note on the text by Leland S. Person; key passages from Hawthorne's notebooks and letters that suggest the close relationship between his private and public writings, and seven new critical essays by Brook Thomas, Michael Ryan, Thomas R. Mitchell, Jay Grossman, Jamie Barlowe, John Ronan and John F. Birk. A Chronology and revised and expanded Selected Bibliography is also included.

As the author of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne has been established as a major writer of the nineteenth century and the most prominent chronicler of New England and its colonial history. This introductory book for students coming to Hawthorne for the first time outlines his life and writings in a clear and accessible style. Leland S. Person also explains some of the significant cultural and social movements that influenced Hawthorne's most important writings: Puritanism, Transcendentalism and Feminism. The major works, including The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, as well as Hawthorne's important short stories and non-fiction, are analysed in detail. The book also includes a brief history and survey of Hawthorne scholarship, with special emphasis on recent studies. Students of nineteenth-century American literature will find this a rewarding and engaging introduction to this remarkable writer.

A Historical Guide to James Fenimore Cooper features new critical essays by noted American literature scholars, Gerald Kennedy, John P. McWilliams, Dana Nelson, and Barbara Mann, as well as a brief biography by authorized Cooper biographer Wayne Franklin and a survey of Cooper scholarship and criticism and bibliography by Jeffrey Walker. Kennedy examines Cooper's five-volume Gleanings in Europe as the most ambitious effort by an antebellum American author to scrutinize the new nation from a critical, transnational perspective. McWilliams challenges the critical and scholarly neglect of Cooper's women, by analyzing the four Revolutionary War novels in which young women play critical roles in furthering political debates about loyalty, independence and family upon which America's new republican culture depends. Examining the five Leatherstocking novels, Nelson shows how groupings of male and female characters across lines of class, habitude and race foreground the problems of creating new identities that can support the democratic aims of the early United States. Mann defends Cooper from nineteenth-century as well as twentieth-century attacks that he was a "race traitor" and argues provocatively that Natty Bumppo is a mixed-race character. Wayne Franklin offers a preview of his forthcoming two-volume biography of Cooper. Editor Leland S. Person provides an introduction and an illustrated chronology of Cooper's life and nineteenth-century historical events.

Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity Leland S. Person Using insights from feminist studies, men's studies, and gay and queer studies, Leland Person examines Henry James's subversion of male identity and the challenges he poses to conventional constructs of heterosexual masculinity. Sexual and gender categories proliferated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Person argues that James exploited the taxonomic confusion of the times to experiment with alternative sexual and gender identities. In contrast to scholars who have tried to give a single label to James's sexuality, Person argues that establishing James's gender and sexual identity is less important than examining the novelist's shaping of male characters and his richly metaphorical language as an experiment in gender and sexual theorizing. Just as an author's creations can be animated by his or her own sexuality, Person contends, James's sexuality may be most usefully understood as something primarily aesthetic and textual. As Person shows in chapters devoted to some of this author's best-known novels--"Roderick Hudson," "The American," "The Portrait of a Lady," "The Bostonians," "The Ambassadors," "The Golden Bowl"--James conducts a series of experiments in gender/sexual construction and deconstruction. He delights in positioning his male characters so that their gender and sexual orientations are reversed, ambiguous, and even multiple. Ultimately, he keeps male identity in suspense by pluralizing male subjectivity. Leland S. Person is Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. 2003 216 pages 6 x 9 ISBN 978-0-8122-3725-2 Cloth $55.00s 36.00 ISBN 978-0-8122-0323-3 Ebook $55.00s 36.00 World Rights Literature, Gay/Lesbian/Queer Studies

This is the first major effort in twenty years to reassess the relationship between Melville and Hawthorne.Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne met in 1850 and enjoyed for sixteen months an intense but brief friendship. Taking advantage of new interpretive tools such as queer theory, globalist studies, political and social ideology, marketplace analysis, psychoanalytical and philosophical applications to literature, masculinist theory, and critical studies of race, the twelve essays in this book focus on a number of provocative personal, professional, and literary ambiguities existing between the two writers.Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S. Person introduce the volume with a lively summary of the known biographical facts of the two writers' relationship and an overview of the relevant scholarship to date. Some of the essays that follow broach the possibility of sexual dimensions to the relationship, a question that ""looms like a grand hooded phantom"" over the field of Melville-Hawthorne studies. Questions of influence - Hawthorne's on Moby-Dick and Pierre and Melville's on The Blithedale Romance, to mention only the most obvious instances - are also discussed. The other topics covered include professional competitiveness; Melville's search for a father figure; masculine ambivalence in the marketplace; and political-literary aspects of nationalism, transcendentalism, race, and other defining issues of Hawthorne and Melville's times.Roughly half of the essays focus on biographical issues; the others take literary perspectives. The essays are informed by a variety of critical approaches, as well as by new historical insights and new understandings of the possibilities that existed for male friendships in nineteenth-century American culture.