Hawthorne Inside Out

Hawthorne’s oeuvre has long frustrated interpretative soundings, from Herman Melville to Henry James to Susan Howe. Dismissing interpretation altogether, however, might lead into another trap, that of overlooking the sometimes unpalatable political implications of his writings. Hawthorne Inside Out takes up this challenge and deploys the tools of critique while remaining mindful of the texts’ resistance to interpretation. In particular, the volume aims at complicating the expectations of hermeneutics, especially the dialectics of surface and depth, and that of inside and outside, attached to it. Situating Hawthorne’s short fiction in its epistemological, political, and religious context, the volume also reads the tales from the standpoint of “our” present traversed with democratic distrust and eco-anxiety; listening to the rustle of his language, to the sounds, echoes, and murmurs that electrify his prose, from potent inward voices to uncanny peals of laughter to ominous murmurs across revolutionary throngs; in sum, reading him close, reading him deep, and always, it is our hope, to the letter.