Rethinking Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nature: Pastoral Experiments and Environmentality

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A friend and associate of the Transcendentalists in Concord, Nathaniel Hawthorne has rarely been taken seriously as a writer interested in the natural world. This book seeks to redress this omission by elucidating the sense of environmentality that emanates from Hawthornes romances and other writings. Hawthornes sense of kinship with the natural world runs deep in his work, particularly when his fiction is examined alongside his voluminous notebooks. Rethinking Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nature also contributes to the growing scholarly work aiming to illuminate Hawthorne as a writer deeply engaged in the issues of his day, particularly involving the environment, rather than an author simply interested in reinterpreting colonial history. Todays readers stand to gain a rich new understanding of Hawthorne by reassessing Hawthornes attitude toward the natural world.

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Rethinking Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nature is a very welcome and long-needed contribution to ecocriticism and nineteenth-century American literary studies, unsettling the common (mis)conception of Hawthorne as the isolated writer and revealing him instead as a man deeply engaged with the natural world around him. In this first book-length ecocritical study of Hawthorne's work, Petersheim brings insightful and wide-ranging analyses to the breadth of Hawthorne's career, including not just the well-known stories and popular romances, but also his nonfiction writings, including his personal notebooks, and the unfinished late romances. Petersheim does an excellent job situating Hawthorne's writing in its historical contexts, all the while bringing a fresh theoretical eye to many of these much studied works.
A much-needed and outstanding study of Hawthorne's preoccupation with Nature, a neglected theme in Hawthorne studies. Steven Petersheim offers a comprehensive view of Hawthorne's relationship to nature in his journals, correspondence, short fiction, travel sketches, and novels. With great verve, Petersheim describes Hawthorne's ongoing fascination with nature from his college days onwards through his travels to Europe and shows unwitting similarities but ofttimes ruptures with his Transcendentalist neighbors in Concord in their assessment of nature. An indispensable resource for scholars and students of nineteenth-century American literature and environmental studies.

Author Bio

Steven Petersheim is associate professor of American literature at Indiana University East and coeditor of Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Ecological Awareness of Early Scribes of Nature.