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Readings of American Pastoral commonly center on the failures or limitations of the American dream, on the multi-generational immigrant experience of upward mobility and ethnic assimilation, and/or on the political and cultural convulsions of the 1960s. To set the book beside To the Lighthouse is to place it within a broader transnational context and subsume Roth the historian of twentieth-century America to Roth the metahistorian and metaphysician reflecting on forces of destruction inimical to civilized order and operative across time. The aim of this essay is twofold: to situate American Pastoral more firmly within the revolutionary context of the 1960s and at the same time, through Woolf, to consider its historicism as it extends beyond the story of the Levovs and America to a disorder latent in things and capable of erupting at any time.

Hawthorne and Dostoyevsky are united not only by the common subject of crime and punishment but also by their preoccupation the operation of what both regarded as “moral law.” In the absence of traditional religious belief, moral law was the writers’ conduit to universal order and to God. Yet what moral law was—real or socially conditioned, naturalistic or supernatural—was a mystery to them and became more so as they explored how the mind operated. The essay focuses on three texts— Crime and Punishment , The Scarlet Letter , and The Marble Faun —but it is not a traditional critical reading; it is a reflection on the vision of the writers as they trace their subject from the conscious and unconscious determinants of crime through its psychological effects to its endpoint in punishment and whatever renewal may or may not lie beyond.

The essay traces Emerson's ideas of “godless religion”; his attraction to and disenchantment with contemporary science; the challenges of 1841–44 as his thought impelled him beyond the terms of his religious synthesis; his efforts thereafter toward a new synthesis; and, when these failed, his retreat to an increasingly rarefied idealism.

Hawthorne's years in England, the least studied phase of his career, are especially significant for the challenge that English materialism posed to his New England austerity and his romancer's idealism. Beyond recording his complex response to English life and character, his “English Notebooks” and “Our Old Home” show how England permanently inflected his character and sense of experience.

Responding in 1957 to a question about his fictional subject, William Faulkner insisted that he did not write about the South and southern civilization save as they constituted the particular “country” that he knew; his interest was “the human heart” (10). Hawthorne spoke similarly when he described himself as “burrowing . . . into the depths of our common nature, for the purposes of psychological romance” (XI: 4). Faulkner and Hawthorne did write about their regions, past and present, explicitly and on levels available to conscious control, but they also wrote from their regions insofar as their notions of “the heart” were inflected by their personal and cultural relationship to a distinctively local world and by the sense of life they introjected, half-unconsciously, from its ethos. Some writers (Melville, for one) are imaginable apart from their birthplace and authorial homes; Hawthorne is not. Over the course of his career, Hawthorne had four major “habitations” that were the scene and literal or figurative subject of his writing: Salem, MA, his ancestral home and ingrained point of reference; Concord, MA, where he lived from 1842 to 1845 (and again in 1852–53 and after 1860) and came into contact with the Adamic

With their fluent colloquial prose and curiosity about life's spectacle, Hawthorne's voluminous notebooks belie the common notion that temperament and talent led him to write works of allegorical romance rather than realism. The essay argues that Hawthorne cultivated romance not because he believed in its idealizing vision but rather because, extrapolating from his experience of “the real,” he didn't.

Recasting Perry Miller's classic “From Edwards to Emerson,” the essay relocates Emerson in the New England spiritual tradition from the Puritans to William James. Even as he dismissed the theological doctrines of Calvinism, Emerson increasingly came to understand himself as replicating many of the psychospiritual truths at its core.

The seasonal rhythm of writing (winter) and repose (summer) that marked Nathaniel Hawthorne9s literary practice can be taken as something between an etiological source and a usable trope for his constitutional ambivalence toward nature, human nature, and the prospect of a natural religion dedicated to the soul9s fulfillment within secular time. As a boy, Hawthorne divided his life between periods in Raymond, Maine, where he "ran quite wild," and residence among his Manning relatives in Salem. Raymond and Salem, summer and winter became his felt symbols of freedom and confinement, sensous delight and sober discipline, much as Quincy and Boston would be for the young Henry Adams. Hawthorne9s darker early tales, associated with his "dismal and squalid chamber" in Salem, originated in obscure sexual guilts, which he came to project outward upon the canvas of history and universalize into a belief in common frailty. His marriage to Sophia Peabody and their life together at Concord9s Old Manse constituted a programmatic effort to exorcise "Salem" and regenerate himself through sunny middle-class domesticity. Responding partly to the Emersonian spirit of cultural renewal, Hawthorne turned in the early 1840s from historical to contemporary subjects, finding his characteristic themes in the prospect of reform. Yet even at the height of New England9s reformist summer, Hawthorne was precluded from a thoroughgoing social critique by the psychic residue of winter. Returning to Salem in 1845, he found once again, as he had on periodic visits to his mother and sisters, that only a concerted hold upon domesticity and socialization kept him from lapsing into the guilt-ridden solitariness of former days. The richness and tension of the mature romances derive from the collision of figurative "Concord" and "Salem," "summer" and "winter"-the naturalist9s prospect of a life of the unfettered senses and the skeptic9s fear that nature, however alluring, meant moral anarchy and spiritual oblivion. What I call Hawthorne9s "winter dreams" are the fables woven by a sensibility powerfully attracted by the vision of a "natural" life-wild, sensuous, and creatively free-yet obliged by guilt and fear to record in the end a stern, self-suppressing "No."

“The american scholar” descends to us as literature, but for the more than two hundred auditors who filled the First Parish Church in Cambridge on August 31, 1837, as for the speaker himself, the address was a singular dramatic occasion. “An event without any former parallel in our literary annals,” James Russell Lowell recalled years later: “What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent!” In the provincial Boston world of 1837, Lowell's “event” — a picturesque memory exhumed from the literary scrapbook and fondly patronized — gave promise of being an “event” in Michel Foucault's sense as well: “not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it.” “The young men went out” from the church, remarked Oliver Wendell Holmes, “as if a prophet had been proclaiming to them, ‘Thus saith the Lord.’”

A ball will bounce, but less and less. It's not A light-hearted thing, resents its own resilience. Falling is what it loves, and the earth falls So in our hearts from brilliance, Settles and is forgot. It takes a sky-blue juggler with five red balls To shake our gravity up. … Richard Wilbur, “Juggler” With hindsight, it seems inevitable that Thoreau should have returned to Walden . It was not quite so inevitable to him, even in September 1851 when he cast about for a project suited to his impulse for “force-ful expression” ( PJ 4, 51). By mid-January 1852 he did return to his manuscript (Sh 31), visiting the pond several times later that month and recording details he would use in his expansion of “The Ponds” in draft D (1852). And on January 22, in Medford, Massachusetts, he presented a lecture entitled “Life in the Woods at Walden” – “as refreshing a piece as the Lyceum will get from any lecturer going at present in New England,” remarked a sympathetic Alcott, who apparently read or heard the lecture beforehand ( Log 177). That same day Thoreau himself reflected on his Walden experience in a quite different spirit: “But Why I changed–? Why I left the woods. I do not think that I can tell. I have often wished myself back” ( PJ 4, 275).

There was a man here, Samian born, but he Had fled from Samos, for he hated tyrants And chose, instead, an exile's lot. His thought Reached far aloft, to the great Gods in Heaven, And his imagination looked on visions Beyond his mortal sight. All things he studied With watchful eager mind, and he brought home What he had learned and sat among the people Teaching them what was worthy, and they listened In silence, wondering at the revelations. … Ovid, Metamorphoses Literature . The author's work, no matter how intelligent, elaborate (Proust) or rich and vigorous in imagination, always turns out to constitute a justification for some particular set of values, … a melodrama in which, even if the hero is actually defeated, he is morally triumphant. … The effort of the author has thus been concentrated on making his life look as if it justified his own ideals – that is, his own desires – and it is the indestructible impulse to make experience, disappointing in actuality, wear a different and more satisfying aspect, which has provided the motive power to carry him through his book. When his work is done, he may feel reassured, half believing that what he has written, because he has asserted it and it has been printed and read by people who assume that the author had some divine revelation of the truth and adopt an attitude toward him based on that assumption – that what he has written must be true. Edmund Wilson, The Twenties

Reimagining Thoreau synthesises the interests of the intellectual and psychological biographer and the literary critic in a reconsideration of Thoreau's career from his graduation from Harvard in 1837 to his death in 1862. The purposes of the book are threefold: to situate Thoreau's aims and achievements as a writer within the context of his troubled relationship to a microcosm of ante-bellum Concord; to reinterpret Walden as a temporally layered text in light of the successive drafts of the book and the evidence of Thoreau's journals and contemporaneous writings; and, to overturn traditional views of Thoreau's 'decline' by offering a new estimate of the post-Walden writing and its place within Thoreau's development.

Melville's Evermoving Dawn contains some of the best writing and thinking on Melville today. Represented here are scholars young and old, traditionalists and new historicists, who gathered at several conferences and venues throughout 1991, the centennial of Herman Melville's death. Meetings occured in Pittsfield, Massachusetts (where Melville wrote Moby-Dick, Pierre, and other works), New York City during Melville week (Sept. 22-28), and Washington, DC, at the Theater of the National Archives. The essays survey the past and present of Melville studies and suggest directions for the future.