This book draws on a range of critical approaches, including cultural anthropology, psychoanalytic theory, political justice theory, and feminist theory, to consider the ways that strategies of death denial and their compensatory consolations offer insight into the ethical, gender, and religious questions raised by Hawthorne's novels.

This book aims both to demystify and to reconstitute 'Hawthorne' as an object of study by rereading Hawthorne's fictions, mainly those from the early 1840's to 1860, in the context of the emergence of a distinctively middle-class personal life (the domestic emotional revolution that accompanied the industrial revolution. Recent histories of middle-class private life, gender, the body, and sexuality now enable us to bring a more encompassing grasp of history to our reading of the 'psychological' in Hawthorne's writing. Rather than taking the conventional view that Freud explains Hawthorne's psychological themes, the author draws on the history of personal life to suggest that mid-century psychological fictions help, historically, to account for the surfacing of a bourgeois Freudian discourse later in the century. The production of Personal Life also asks why it was that women in mid-century fiction, especially that written by men, were represented as psychological targets of male monomaniacs in the home. By connecting the enforcement of middle-class 'feminine' roles to psychological tension between the sexes, Hawthorne's fiction at times implicitly critiques the sentimental construction of gender roles on which the economic and cultural ascendancy of his class relied.

What was it like to participate in the Women's Liberation Movement? What made millions of women step forward from the 1960s onwards and join it in different ways? Many of the 56 women in this book were there. They describe how they have contributed in multitudinous ways across politics, the arts, health, education, environmentalism, economics and science and created wonderfully rebellious activism. And how they continue this activism today with determined grittiness. Here are women - all over 70 years of age - still railing against the patriarchal systemic oppression of women, still fighting back --

Author Nathaniel Hawthorne's sister Louisa drowns in an 1852 steamship accident. Cousin John Stephens Dike suspects foul play. Reading family documents bequeathed to him by cousin Elizabeth will prove his theory of a tragic love triangle, but first he must conquer his own demons. Will he and Pittsburgh lawyer Tom Blair assure justice is served?

The Birthmark deals with the husband's deeply negative obsession of his wife's outer appearances and what does that entail for these two young couples. The birthmark represents various things throughout the story. Two of the main representations are imperfection and mortality. American novelist and short story writer Nathaniel Hawthorne's (1804–1864) writing centers on New England, many works featuring moral allegories with a Puritan inspiration. Hawthorne has also written a few poems which many people are not aware of. His works are considered to be part of the Romantic movement and, more specifically, Dark romanticism. His themes often centre on the inherent evil and sin of humanity, and his works often have moral messages and deep psychological complexity.

What is the role of sex in the age of democratic beginnings? Despite the sober republican ideals of the Enlightenment, the literature of America’s early years speaks of unruly, carnal longings. Elizabeth Dill argues that the era’s proliferation of texts about extramarital erotic intimacy manifests not an anxiety about the dangers of unfettered feeling but an endorsement of it. Uncovering the more prurient aspects of nation-building, Erotic Citizens establishes the narrative of sexual ruin as a genre whose sustained rejection of marriage acted as a critique of that which traditionally defines a democracy: the social contract and the sovereign individual. Through an examination of philosophical tracts, political cartoons, frontispiece illustrations, portraiture, and the novel from the antebellum period, this study reconsiders how the terms of embodiment and selfhood function to define national belonging. From an enslaved woman’s story of survival in North Carolina to a philosophical treatise penned by an English earl, the readings employ the trope of sexual ruin to tell their tales. Such narratives advanced the political possibilities of the sympathetic body, looking beyond the marriage contract as the model for democratic citizenship. Against the cult of the individual that once seemed to define the era, Erotic Citizens argues that the most radical aspect of the Revolution was not the invention of a self-governing body but the recognition of a self whose body is ungovernable.

Offering innovative, psychoanalytic readings of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s four romances, this volume systematically applies Freudian theory to present significant new insights into the psychology of Hawthorne’s characters and their fates. By critically examining scenes in which the protagonists confront past traumas, Diamond underscores the transformative potential which Hawthorne attributes to encounters with the unconscious. Psychoanalytic narrative technique is employed to interpret the psychogical crises, all hidden by Hawthorne in narrative gaps, in The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun. The protagonists' transformations that are illuminated are crucial to an understanding of the trajectory and resolution of the romances. The text will benefit both academic and non-academic readers who seek a deeper understanding of the psychology of Hawthorne's romances. It will be of particular interest to educators and researchers of applied psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic technique. Since its conclusions challenge many currently held critical views, this volume is especially relevant to scholars of Hawthorne studies, interdisciplinary literary studies, and 19th century American literature.

This book contextualizes 21st century representations of disappearance, torture, and detention within a historical framework of inter-American narratives. Examining a range of sources, Pitt finds a persistent focus on the body that links contemporary practices of political terror to concerns about corporality and sovereignty.

The shadow of Napoleon never left the nineteenth-century and continued to haunt the histories and wars that followed in curious and circuitous ways. The empires of Napoleon I and his nephew, Napoleon III, set the stage for the pendulum swing of time from revolution to its antithesis, empire. The Anglo-Italian style developed as a reaction to these empires, the widespread devastation caused by power, and the monuments it created. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Harriet Hosmer, William Wetmore Story, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James and Vernon Lee responded to recurring themes in Italian Risorgimento politics and culture in the post-Napoleonic era and Second Empire periods. Many of them were ex-patriots, who adopted Italy as their new home. Their unique contribution aligns them with a style that is distinguished by the themes of national independence, feminism, the abolition of slavery and republicanism. They perceived their own time in terms of parallel dimensions in which the past and present converged in national histories at home, in America and England, and in Italy, their new ideal state. The language of their new nationalism evolved from the chronological study of Ancient Rome up to the Renaissance, and the style of both revolution and empire, neoclassicism, while their perspective was largely shaped by a reactionary contrast between the empires of Napoleon I and III, and an ideal state they envisioned for Italy.