;Blackwood's ;Responses to Hawthorne in Light of Its Mid-Nineteenth Century Transatlantic Reputation
Abstract
Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine was arguably the most important and widely published literary magazine of the nineteenth century. Its readership extended from Britain to America, shaping literary tastes across the Anglophone literary marketplace. BEM wrote two reviews of Nathaniel Hawthornes fiction during the authors most prolific years. The first was published in 1847 and contained a lengthy reflection of the state of American literature that prefaced its review of Mosses from an Old Manse. In 1855, BEM reviewed Hawthornes novels. The language of these reviews encouraged BEMs transatlantic readership to interpret Hawthorne in a very particular light: a dark, intense, and deeply psychological Hawthorne. In other words, BEM promoted a version of Hawthorne that would ultimately stick and become the standard Hawthorne adopted by twentieth-century historians of the œAmerican Renaissance. I argue that BEMs reviews reveal a relationship with American literature predisposed to appreciate a dark, symbolic, gothic literature, and that Hawthorne, like Irving before him, succeeded in becoming one of the greatest writers of mid-nineteenth-century American literature because he was able to appeal to and please a transatlantic, and particularly a British, audience. By transcending geographic boundaries, at least in BEMs reviews, Hawthorne was ironically identified as an iconic œAmerican writer.
Degree
MA
College and Department
Humanities; English
BYU ScholarsArchive Citation
Boud, Holly Young, ";Blackwood's ;Responses to Hawthorne in Light of Its Mid-Nineteenth Century Transatlantic Reputation" (2018). Theses and Dissertations. 7316.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/7316
Date Submitted
2018-04-01
Document Type
Thesis
Handle
http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd9813
Keywords
Blackwood<'>s, Hawthorne, American Renaissance, book history, transatlantic
Language
english