Abstract
As Emerson in Representative Men developed possibilities provided by Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, so Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter (1851) pursued possibilities offered by the Waverley novels and especially by The Heart of Midlothian. Scholars have found that a wide variety of authors influenced Hawthorne, including colonial American writers, Spenser and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British authors.1 They have attributed special importance to the influence of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Spenser’s allegory.2 But Scott’s influence upon Hawthorne has never been adequately discussed.
He was free of history if only that he was now in it, and no longer something of someone else’s.
Robert Creeley (The Island)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
According to H. Arlin Turner the list includes Cotton Mather, Walpole, Southey, Thomas Browne, Nathaniel Mather, ‘Hawthorne’s Literary Borrowings’, PMLA, 51 (June 1936), 543–62.
The most important articles dealing with Spenser’s influence are Randall Stewart, ‘Hawthorne and The Faerie Queene’, Philological Quarterly, 12 (April 1933), 196–207 and Herbert A. Leibowitz, ‘Hawthorne and Spenser: Two Sources’, American Literature, 30, No. 4 (January 1959), 459–66.
Herbert A. Leibowitz, ‘Hawthorne and Spenser: Two Sources’, American Literature, 30, No. 4 (January 1959), 459–66.
I am indebted here to two works in particular: H. W. Boynton, Annals of American Bookselling, 1638–1850 (New York: Wiley, 1932).
Henry A. White, Sir Walter Scott’s Novels on the Stage (London: Oxford University Press, 1927).
G. Harrison Orians, ‘The Romance Ferment After Waverley’, American Literature, 3 (January 1932), 408–31.
James Fenimore Cooper, Notions of the Americans Picked Up By a Travelling Bachelor (London, 1828), 11, 142.
Richard Davis, Literature and Society in Early Virginia 1608–1840 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), p. 236.
George Dekker, James Fenimore Cooper: The Novelist (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967).
George E. Hastings, ‘How Cooper Became A Novelist’, American Literature, 12 (March 1940), 20–51;
Susan Fenimore Cooper, The Cooper Gallery: Or, Pages and Pictures from the life of James Fenimore Cooper, with Notes (New York: Miller, 1865), p. 17.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, English Notebooks, ed. Randall Stewart (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), p. 537.
Sir Walter Scott, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, addressed to J. G. Lockhart, Esq. (London: Murray, 1830), p. 2.
I am indebted here to G. Harrison Orians, ‘Scott and Hawthorne’s Fanshawe’, New England Quarterly, 2 (June 1938), 388–94.
Douglas Grant, the only scholar who had drawn attention to a connection between Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian, observes only that both novels open with a dramatic technique that connects the present with the past in which the novel is set and that both Effie and Hester conceal the paternity of their child. Douglas Grant, ‘Sir Walter Scott and Nathaniel Hawthorne’, University of Leeds Review 8 (1963), 38–79;.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, ed. Douglas Grant (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. xv–xvi.
Alice Lovelace Cooke, ‘Some evidences of Hawthorne’s Indebtedness to Swift’, University of Texas Studies in English, 18 (July 1938), 140–62.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks, ed. Claude M. Simpson (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1972), p. 242.
Ann Marie McNamara, ‘The Character of Flame: The Function of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter’, American Literature, 27, No. 4 (June 1956), 537–53.
Frederick Crews, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 17–25.
Copyright information
© 1982 Linden Peach
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Peach, L. (1982). Imaginative Sympathy: Hawthorne’s British Soulmate. In: British Influence on the Brith of American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16798-2_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16798-2_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-16800-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-16798-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)