San Antonio College Library

Widely condemned even in his own time, Nathaniel Hawthorne's views on abolitionism and slavery are today frequently characterized by scholars as morally reprehensible. Devils and Rebels explores the historical and biographical record to reveal striking evidence of the author's true political values--values grounded in pacifism and resistant to the kind of binary thinking that could lead to violence and war. The book offers fresh readings of not only...

This book aims both to demystify and to reconstitute 'Hawthorne' as an object of study by rereading Hawthorne's fictions, mainly those from the early 1840's to 1860, in the context of the emergence of a distinctively middle-class personal life (the domestic emotional revolution that accompanied the industrial revolution. Recent histories of middle-class private life, gender, the body, and sexuality now enable us to bring a more encompassing grasp...

"In Writing Revolution, Peter J. Bellis explores the ways in which literature can engage with - rather than escape from or obscure - social and political issues." "Bellis argues that a number of nineteenth-century American writers, including Nathanial Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, saw their texts as spaces where alternative social and cultural possibilities could be suggested and explored. All writing in the same historical moment,...