New Essays on the Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthornes status as an artist rests as much on The Scarlet Letter as on his short fictions. It is both telling and appropriate that academic research in the short story should be dated to Mary Rohrbergers study Hawthorne and the Modern Short Story, published in 1966. The present volume adds to this discourse with contributions by Paulina Ambroy, Katarzyna Kuczma, Joseph Kuhn, David Malcolm, Marek Pary, Janusz Semrau, Pawe Stachura, and Marek Wilczyski. Represented here are some of the most widely-known stories, such as My Kinsman, Major Molineux, Wakefield, Roger Malvins Burial, Ethan Brand, The Great Stone Face, and some of the less widely-known ones, such as Legends of the Province-House, The Haunted Mind, The Threefold Destiny, Foot-prints on the Sea-shore. The individual essays discuss Hawthornes texts in quasi-generic terms, through some persistent American themes and motifs, as well as for their aesthetic, philosophical, and existential meanings. The readings draw ideological and theoretical support from the thought of Emerson, Hegel, Trilling, de Certeau, Freud, Heidegger, Lacan, and Derrida.