Gary Richard Thompson

Library of America

Edgar Allan Poe

Gathers Poe's essays on the theory of poetry, the art of fiction, the role of the critic, leading nineteenth-century writers, and the New York literary world

Essays and Reviews

Poe's Fiction, Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales

The critical literary world has spent a wealth of thought and words on the question of Hawthorne himself: Where does he stand in his works? In history? In literary tradition? In this major new study, G. R. Thompson recasts the "Hawthorne question" to show how authorial presence in the writer's works is as much a matter of art as the writing itself. The Hawthorne who emerges from this masterful analysis is not, as has been supposed, identical to the provincial narrator of his early tales; instead he is revealed to be the skillful manipulator of that narrative voice, an author at an ironic distance from the tales he tells. By focusing on the provincial tales as they were originally conceived--as a narrative cycle--Thompson is able to recover intertextual references that reveal Hawthorne's preoccupation with framing strategies and variations on authorial presence. The author shows how Hawthorne deliberately constructs sentimental narratives, only to deconstruct them. Thompson's analysis provides a new aesthetic context for understanding the whole shape of Hawthorne's career as well as the narrative, ethical, and historical issues within individual works. Revisionary in its view of one of America's greatest authors, The Art of Authorial Presence also offers invaluable insight into the problems of narratology and historiography, ethics and psychology, romanticism and idealism, and the cultural myths of America.

Hawthorne's Provincial Tales

The Art of Authorial Presence

Essays in Dark Romanticism

The Gothic Imagination

Virgil Lokke

Virgil Llewellyn Lokke

A recurrent idea in Darrel Abel's criticism of the works of Hawthorne gives this volume its title. The idea of a fallen world and its potential for partial redemption through art and the art of criticism is a theme that weaves in and out of the sixteen essays. The volume as a whole displays an explicit and implicit concern with critical approaches and reflects an awareness of the Activeness of critical resolutions in a world in which boundaries are constantly under challenge, for example, those which divide "textuality" from "contextuality." "This collection of essays explores the problems the practical critic and teacher has had to face in the shifts in taste, assumptions, and methodology in the moves from moral and historical criticism to the "New Criticism," and to the newer linguistic and semiotic criticism.

Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe : Critical Essays in Honor of Darrel Abel

Ruined Eden of the Present

Gary Richard Thompson

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