Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family (New Historicism)

Herbert, T. Walter

ISBN 10: 0520075870 / ISBN 13: 9780520075870

Published by University of California Press, 1993

About this Item

331 pages.

Seller Inventory # 55480

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family (New Historicism)
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication Date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520075870
• ISBN 13: 9780520075870
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

The marriage of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne―for their contemporaries a model of true love and married happiness―was also a scene of revulsion and combat. T. Walter Herbert reveals the tragic conflicts beneath the Hawthorne's ideal of domestic fulfillment and shows how their marriage reflected the tensions within nineteenth-century society. In so doing, he sheds new light on Hawthorne's fiction, with its obsessive themes of guilt and grief, balked feminism and homosexual seduction, adultery, patricide, and incest.

About the Author

T. Walter Herbert is University Scholar and Brown Professor of English at Southwestern University. He is the author of Moby-Dick and Calvinism: A World Dismantled (1977) and Marquesan Encounters: Melville and the Meaning of Civilization (1980).