In The Marble Faun (1860), three young Americans discover artistic and moral freedom in Rome, flourishing among Europeans and devastating one another with love. Hawthorne's innovative foray into the influence of European thought on American culture is a timeless study of the loss of innocence an[...]
Using a variety of historical sources, Richard H. Brodhead reconstructs the institutionalized literary worlds that coexisted in nineteenth-century America: the middle-class domestic culture of letters, the culture of mass-produced cheap reading, the militantly hierarchical high culture of post-emanc[...]