Offers critical entries on Hawthorne's novels, short stories, travel writing, criticism, and other works, as well as portraits of characters, including Hester Prynne and Roger Chillingworth. This reference also provides entries on Hawthorne's family, friends - ranging from Herman Melville to President Franklin Pierce - publishers, and critics.

Features a biographical chapter that relates Hawthorne's life to his work, a chapter on his career and contributions to American literature, and chapters that analyze his most important short stories and novels in turn.

Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne met in 1850 and enjoyed for sixteen months an intense but brief friendship. Taking advantage of new interpretive tools such as queer theory, globalist studies, political and social ideology, marketplace analysis, psychoanalytical and philosophical applications to literature, masculinist theory, and critical studies of race, the twelve essays in this book focus on a number of provocative personal, professional, and literary ambiguities existing between the two writers. Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S. Person introduce the volume with a lively summary of the known biographical facts of the two writers’ relationship and an overview of the relevant scholarship to date. Some of the essays that follow broach the possibility of sexual dimensions to the relationship, a question that “looms like a grand hooded phantom” over the field of Melville-Hawthorne studies. Questions of influence--Hawthorne’s on Moby-Dick and Pierre and Melville’s on The Blithedale Romance, to mention only the most obvious instances--are also discussed. Other topics covered include professional competitiveness; Melville’s search for a father figure; masculine ambivalence in the marketplace; and political-literary aspects of nationalism, transcendentalism, race, and other defining issues of Hawthorne and Melville’s times. Roughly half of the essays focus on biographical issues; the others take literary perspectives. The essays are informed by a variety of critical approaches, as well as by new historical insights and new understandings of the possibilities that existed for male friendships in nineteenth-century American culture.

This volume, covering entries from "Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu" to "Oscar Wilde," includes a primary sources section written by the featured author, overviews of the author's career and general studies, and in-depth analyses of seminal works by the author.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction has left a lasting impression on writers, scholars, and readers around the world.

Explores the connections between British and American Romanticism, focusing on the novels of Elizabeth Inchbald (1753-1821) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64). This study argues that Inchbald and Hawthorne are representative of a larger British/American cultural confluence during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Examines the life and career of Edgar Allan Poe including synopses of many of his works, biographies of family and friends, a discussion of Poe's influence on other writers, and places that influenced his writing.

Examines the life and writings of Henry James including detailed synopses of his works, explanations of literary terms, biographies of friends and family, and social and historical influences.