"Some Dark Imagined Sculptor": Hawthorne's Ecogothic Rocks.

Employing an ecogothic approach, this article examines how Nathaniel Hawthorne, in "Roger Malvin's Burial" and "The Man of Adamant," portrays an American Gothic landscape scattered with stones that function as agentic entities charged with uncanny purpose. Hawthorne engages in a compelling gothic geology, one in which literal and figurative rocks, as well as a host of other instances of lithic imagery, figure not as static scenery but as dynamic and deeply meaningful participants in the tale. In these and other of Hawthorne's ecogothic stories, stones variously merge with and emerge from the characters themselves, who become absorbed, at times literally, into the wilderness. Ultimately, the author analyzes Hawthorne's portrayal of the often intimate and profound relationship between stone and humanity, paying special attention to formulations in which characters not only obsess over stones and what they represent but also come to absorb, mirror, and intersect with their materiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]