A Thick and Darksome Veil Tapa dura - 1994

Descripción de contraportada

Much has been written on Nathaniel Hawthorne's novels and tales, but his sketches, prefaces, and essays have been generally overlooked. Thomas R. Moore considers these lesser-known works to be the central battleground for Hawthorne's struggle to balance "the demands of his readership for a sentimental and nostalgic style and his own demands for a more truthful discourse and subject matter." This tension is a major concern of any publishing writer, but it was particularly relevant for the writers of the American Renaissance: Emerson eloquently distinguished between the "partial and noisy readers of the hour" and "an eternal public." As they sought to forge a literary tradition, American writers met with the artistic obstacle of the public preference for sentimental novels and stories of the past. Moore argues that Hawthorne overcame this obstacle by employing a subversive rhetoric. He explores the narrative voices in several of Hawthorne's sketches and demonstrates that there is often a distinction between the narrative persona of the text and the writer himself. Hawthorne's contemporaries - Herman Melville, for example - were aware of the duplicitous nature of this rhetoric. Moore goes on to argue that "it is the polarities in Hawthorne's tales that account for nearly one hundred and fifty years of continuous popularity." Moore expands his focus on Hawthorne's narrative strategies to a more general consideration of his style and rhetoric, pointing out that the same subversions manifested through multivocality are evident also in more subtle stylistic maneuvers. He shows how the authors outward adherence to standard and accepted rhetoric masks a socially and culturally variant subtext, and concludes that "discourse as a veil is a recurrent strategy in Hawthorne." A Thick and Darksome Veil makes a significant contribution to Hawthorne scholarship and to studies of the American Renaissance and rhetoric.