Deanna Fernie
Ashgate
Hardback
250
Deanna Fernie's beautifully written and intellectually rewarding book analyses the recurring motif of the fragment in Hawthorne's fiction specifically its double trajectory towards past and future to trace Hawthorne's lifelong engagement with American art. Juxtaposed throughout Hawthorne's writings are unfinished and ruined images from the rough-hewn figurehead of 'Drowne's Wooden Image' (1844) to the tattered letter 'A' in the unfinished loft of the Custom House in The Scarlet Letter (1850). The tension between the formed and unformed permits Hawthorne to interrogate the origins of American art and how it can be made distinct from European models. Fernie establishes the intellectual contexts for her study through a discussion of the eighteenth-century fascination with ruins and fragments revealed in British and Continental literature. Her book will be an important text not only for American literature scholars but for anyone interested in British and Continental Romanticism and the intersection of art and literature.
Ashgate
Hardback
250
Deanna Fernie's beautifully written and intellectually rewarding book analyses the recurring motif of the fragment in Hawthorne's fiction specifically its double trajectory towards past and future to trace Hawthorne's lifelong engagement with American art. Juxtaposed throughout Hawthorne's writings are unfinished and ruined images from the rough-hewn figurehead of 'Drowne's Wooden Image' (1844) to the tattered letter 'A' in the unfinished loft of the Custom House in The Scarlet Letter (1850). The tension between the formed and unformed permits Hawthorne to interrogate the origins of American art and how it can be made distinct from European models. Fernie establishes the intellectual contexts for her study through a discussion of the eighteenth-century fascination with ruins and fragments revealed in British and Continental literature. Her book will be an important text not only for American literature scholars but for anyone interested in British and Continental Romanticism and the intersection of art and literature.