hawthorne and the Puritans: Some Uses of the Past

FAIN: FB-12766-76

Barbara J. Rogers
Ramapo College of New Jersey (Mahwah, NJ 07430-1623)

To undertake an interdisciplinary study of Hawthorne's Puritan sources in the light of the historical fiction into which he transformed them, and to gain insight into Hawthorne's creative process, his development as an American symbolist, and his curiously detached, ambivalent attitude toward that Puritan society out of which his own had so recently sprung. Study will lead to design of a course in the literature of the Puritans which does not yet exist in the Ramapo curriculum.