The Productive Tension of Hawthorne's Art - Softcover

Johnson, Claudia Durst

9780817300517: The Productive Tension of Hawthorne's Art

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0817300511 ISBN 13: 9780817300517

Publisher: University Alabama Press, 2017

In The Productive Tension of Hawthorne’s Art, Claudia D. Johnson identifies and explores the tension between Nathaniel Hawthorne’s concepts of art and morality by describing its sources, plotting its manifestations, and suggesting how the opposing elements of this tension are finally reconciled.

Hawthorne’s major works, including his short fiction, exhibit a profound conflict between eighteenth-century views of an orderly, balanced, and static universe on the one hand and nineteenth-century conceptions of a universe in constant flux on the other. Johnson argues that Hawthorne, though he did not identify with any organized church, found in theology the myths that allowed him to negotiate a bridge between these two opposed views of the world and to forge the social, psychological, and aesthetic values that inform his art.

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About the Author:

Claudia D. Johnson is a former professor of English at the University of Alabama. Her scholarship focuses on “gothicism” in To Kill a Mockingbird, the role of prostitutes as patrons of the theater in the nineteenth century, and Hawthorne and early American religion. She is the author of nine books as well as the author or editor of eighteen reference and textbooks. She lives in Berkeley, California.

Review:

“The chief originality of [The Productive Tension of Hawthorne’s Art] lies in its discussion of perfectionism; but its analyses are in general intelligent, moderate, and useful.”
—Library Journal

“On the whole, Claudia D. Johnson’s The Productive Tension of Hawthorne’s Art is a thoughtful new treatment of an old but fundamental subject developed in a lucid economical style. . . . . an uncommonly valuable book in a field that in recent years has been marked by distinguished contributions.”
—South Atlantic Review

"Well-focused, incisive, and exciting."
—Richard Harter Fogle, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"A solid, . . . well-written contribution to Hawthorne criticism . . . The author is thoroughly in control of what has been written about Hawthorne and skillfully places her own work in the context of this scholarship and criticism. So far as I know, she is the first critic to consider the probable influence of the 'perfectionists' on Hawthorne's art. She also enriches our understanding of the organic and the mechanical and offers perceptive readings of the major works."
—Roy R. Male, University of Oklahoma

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