The Moral Picturesque: Studies in Hawthorne's Fiction - Hardcover

Abel, Darrel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0911198911 ISBN 13: 9780911198911

Publisher: Purdue University Press, 1988

Synopsis

The book is a collection of fourteen essays by Abel on Hawthorne's fiction. The essays were published over a span of about thirty-five years in various scholarly journals. The author has revised some of these essays considerably and has added seven chapters to give the book continuity and unity. Abel studies two characteristics, besides the classic elegance of its style, that distinguish Hawthorne’s fiction. One characteristic is Hawthorne’s habitual use of a psychological approach to its subjects. He assumed an absolute of archetypal human experiences enacting a providentially directed drama of which he had an uncertain knowledge through sympathy with characters assuming primordial roles. The other characteristic was Hawthorne’s use of the mode that he called “the moral picturesque.” This was a mode of figuration of the archetypal experiences that his psychological preoccupations discovered. His sensibility penetrated more deeply than his often banal thought, and the picturesque mode enabled him to cognize perceptions that were not reducible to explicit statement. In all his work he was preoccupied with two concerns: how the ideal appears in the real world, and the distinction and relation of the sexes. He saw in both these concerns paradoxes of opposition and affinity. He dealt with these paradoxes, not as subjects of philosophical speculation, but as matters for artistic treatment. In fact, he thought that the problems of relation posed by these paradoxes were insoluble, and his sole concerns was to present them vividly and dramatically.

About this title

About the Author:

Darrel Abel was born in 1911 in Lost Nation, Iowa. As a young man, he took all the course offered through the University of Iowa’s writing program, which would later be known as the Iowa Writers workshop. He earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees at Iowa, then went on to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. During his long teaching career, Abel was a Fulbright professor at Freilburg University for a year and taught 30 years at Purdue University. He edited American Literature: Critical Theory in the American Renaissance. He is the author of about fifty journal articles – mostly on Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, and Frost – as well as numerous reviews.

Review:

“There is more Hawthorne here than we had known before, a larger and more significant Hawthorne, more allied to the larger world of thought. These must be some of the deepest and thought-provoking meditations on Hawthorne ever produced. The ensemble amounts to a magisterial commentary on the complete works of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

(William H. Shurr)

“Abel has managed to produce a volume that is not a collection of articles, but an integrated book that develops a theme.”

(Donald Ringe)

“. . . an effectively organized and gracefully written book . . . . Unencumbered by pretense or jargon, The Moral Picturesque can serve as a useful introduction to Hawthorne’s theory of romance and its application in the dramatic action of his works. Recommended for undergraduate, graduate, and public libraries.”

Choice

About this edition

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0911198911
• ISBN 13: 9780911198911
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 324