The Literature in Context series promises accessibility and breadth in its treatment of major authors. Certainly bracing and wide-ranging, this collection on Nathaniel Hawthorne and his world is a useful, if not very innovative, guide for graduate students or enterprising undergraduate students who will marvel at literary study's variety. While some of the debates reviewed in the collection are well known to trained scholars, like Hawthorne's “misogyny or feminism” (3), many students will benefit from reviewing foundational arguments that are so often assumed in more specialized articles or essays.

The book contains five parts: “Hawthorne and History,” “Popular Culture and Social Movements,” “Hawthorne and the Literary Marketplace,” “Hawthorne and Literary Traditions,” and “Family and Place.” Across these topics, the contributors either use historical details to understand Hawthorne and his works or use Hawthorne and his works to understand nineteenth-century history, culture, and ideas. Since many of these brief essays seek to understand Hawthorne himself, some arguments can read as tautological: “Hawthorne's interest in place reflects how important places were in his own life and development, both as an individual and as a writer” (386). Appreciating the inquisitive mind of the author, rather than the “context” itself, seems to be indicative of the contributors’ scholarly investments, as a good number have published or edited single-author studies and abide by F. O. Matthiessen's definition of the American Renaissance.

Many of the essays advance the thesis that readers should understand Hawthorne as ambivalent in his politics and provocatively ambiguous in his writings, as a writer who “offers a spiritual tonic to deadly certainties” (110). The best essays move beyond such conclusions to say something more about Hawthorne's ambivalence. This is indeed how Joel Pfister interprets Hawthorne when he shows how Hawthorne's fiction mirrors capitalism's reproduction of middle-class individuals through print culture and sentimentalism. Nancy F. Sweet's piece on “Hawthorne and the Women's Rights Movement” explains how readers can appreciate Hawthorne's lack of certainty and still read his fiction to uncover the “devastating repercussions of antebellum gender norms” (99). Ellen Weinauer also pushes beyond Hawthorne's ambivalence to suggest that many of his works “offer an integrative vision that reconciles city and country” (136), thereby challenging critical consensus on Hawthorne's anti-urban attitude. A major source of Hawthorne's ambivalence is his relation to the United States. Alfred Bendixen's “Hawthorne and the American Gothic” and Leland S. Person's “Hawthorne and the American Romance” show Hawthorne's striving for uniquely American style, while James Hewitson's contribution about Hawthorne in England explores Hawthorne's conflicted feelings about America's colonial past and the inevitable splintering of the nation into civil war.

One of the greatest strengths of this collection is the authors’ use of a wide range of Hawthorne's works, which accurately reflects current nineteenth-century literary study. Examining more obscure writings enables keen interrogation of relationships amongst genre, art, and society. Kristie G. Hamilton's “Hawthorne's Literary Sketches” highlights Hawthorne's purposefully ephemeral writing and also describes Hawthorne as something of a social theorist. Additionally, attention to minor moments in major texts provides strong readings. With his turn to Hepzibah from The House of Seven Gables (1850), David Greven challenges critics who assess Hawthorne's views on women and gender through only the young, feminine heroines. A small number of the essays interrogate how social context makes it into Hawthorne's art, or vice versa, in less than obvious ways. This group includes Margaret Jay Jessee's essay, which makes an argument for a “melodramatic affect” in Hawthorne's writing, comparing scenes of silence in the The Scarlet Letter (1850) with melodrama's use of gesture and symbols.

Reading a book on America's first canonical author “in context,” it is difficult not to think of the recent J19 roundtable on the issue of canonicity, in which Robert Levine suggests that we might continue reading canonical American authors by putting them in conversation with different issues and different authors than we have in the past.Footnote ¹ Nathaniel Hawthorne in Context provides the traditional pairings, putting Hawthorne in conversation with Melville, Poe, his “Romantic Predecessors,” and the Transcendentalists. Entries in this collection that suggest more inventive thinking about this enduring author are Steven Petersheim's “Hawthorne and Natural Landscapes,” Laura Laffrado's “Hawthorne's Writings for Children,” Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock's “Hawthorne and Science Fiction,” and Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso's “Transnational Hawthorne and Magical Realism.” The last of these, along with Laura L. Mielke's essay, which reveals Native American presence through strategies of “displacement” (48) and “disassociation” (54), are perhaps the essays most divergent from the rest in their methodologies, more explicitly rethinking “context” in relation to text. Although these scholars cannot spend precious pages putting Hawthorne in conversation with less-expected contemporaries, as many of our syllabi (should) do today, the possibilities they offer are exciting and ethically exigent.