Inchbald, Hawthorne and the Romantic Moral Romance:
Little Histories and Neutral Territories
Ben P Robertson
Literary Migrations
978 1 85196 627 1: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 85196 589 2
This study explores the connections between British and American Romanticism, focusing on the novels of Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64). Inchbald sought to legitimize herself as a serious author in a society that privileged male authorship. Fifty years later, Hawthorne struggled to establish an indigenous American literature in a British-dominated publishing world. Both novelists achieved huge popularity in their day. Although Inchbald is now overshadowed by the major male Romantic poets, A Simple Story (1791) has never been out of print. Most famous for The Scarlet Letter (1850), Hawthorne is now recognised as a founder of American literature.
Although the two authors wrote on opposite sides of the Atlantic and with different goals, they produced remarkably similar texts that point to a connection between British and American culture. Robertson characterizes their novels as the ‘Romantic moral romance’, a unique kind of romance that acts as an experimental sub-genre of the novel. He argues that Inchbald and Hawthorne are representative of a larger British/American cultural confluence during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Readership
Romanticism, American Literature, Women's Writing
Contents
Introduction: The Romantic Moral Romance: An Alternative Trans-Atlantic Sub-Genre for Elizabeth Inchbald and Nathaniel Hawthorne
Chapter 1: “Written in a Style to Endure”: Common Sources for the Romantic Moral Romance and the Impact of Inchbald’s Trans-Atlantic Reputation
Chapter 2, “Fable-Worlds” Populated by “Human Creatures”: Toward a Definition of the Experimental Romantic Moral Romance
Chapter 3: Adapting the “Great Voicer of Truth”: Shakespearean Liminality in the Romantic Moral Romance
Chapter 4: “I Will Not Accept Your Moral!”: Propositions of an Alternative, Individual, and Liminal Moral Order for Inchbald and Hawthorne
Chapter 5: Figures “Pourtrayed Apart” with “Real or Well-Counterfeited Simplicity”: Complicating the Romantic Moral Romance with Symbolic and Fragmentary Figures
Conclusion, “Impressions of Veracity”: Echoes of the Romantic Moral Romance in the Modern, Symbolic Novel