Date of Award
Spring 1972
Document Type
Dissertation - Restricted
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English
First Advisor
DeFalco, Jose
Second Advisor
Sheeran, Francis J.
Third Advisor
Thale, Jerome
Abstract
When Nathaniel Hawthorne gave his four monumental "Romances" to the world in the middle decade of the nineteenth century, he hoped that he would have an audience willing to accept and understand the important things he had to say. But like any good story-teller, he was first of all an entertainer, and he worked conscientiously to frame human truths in settings, characters, and plots interesting for their own sake. Part of Hawthorne's enduring success stems from the way he cast his stories into the romantic mold of his own making. Although he drew from established models, he was ingenious in providing those touches of the imaginary and fantastic which mark each of his books as unique. Among those touches is the milieu, the "atmospherical medium" in which events occur. It is this romantic milieu I have attempted to describe and trace in Hawthorne's four great works, in an effort to discover something of the richness of an art which continues to yield new insights to successive generations of readers.