Bøger af Michael J. Colacurcio

Hawthorne's Literary History picks up Hawthorne where The Province of Piety left him, extending the historical and theological reading there developed of the early Puritan and revolutionary tales Hawthorne wrote in birthplace Salem on to the contemporary tales, sketches, essays, and finally four published romances based on his stays in Brook Farm, Boston, Concord, Lenox, Salem, Liverpool, and Rome.A collection of essays rather than a single, continuously argued monograph, Hawthorne's Literary History collects together the essays Professor Colacurcio has written on Hawthorne since the publication of his ground-breaking Province of Piety, elaborating and refining his analyses of how Hawthorne's most memorable early tales "e;do history,"e; but proceeding then to explore the later productions of that author's distinguished career. The result, in Colacurcio's patient analysis, is something like Hawthorne's history of his own times.

In Emerson and Other Minds, Michael J. Colacurcio traces the long arc of Ralph Waldo Emerson's writings. While Emerson seldom argues academically in his essays, he intends the essays to be primary acts of philosophy. The essays are also highly wrought literary performances, and so they need to be closely read in the New Critical manner.Colacurcio proposes that Emerson is one of modernity's central writers on the question of "e;privacy"e;: the unsettling epistemological fact that even though people have the ability to share through language the experiences that shape their version of the world, no one else can fully experience another's process of creating and evaluating the world. Emerson may imagine a transparent eyeball, but never a universal retina. This ineluctable privacy underwrites the famous moral doctrine of "e;self-reliance,"e; but it also helps to explain the painful problems of love and friendship.Colacurcio's reading results in a two--volume compilation that reminds us of the importance of encountering and remembering Emerson for more than his famous sentences. Conversing with himself and other powerful minds on fundamental questions of human knowledge and behavior, Emerson produced brilliant essays--both philosophical and literary in the fullest sense--that richly reward closer examination.

In Godly Letters, Michael J. Colacurcio analyzes a treasury of works written by the first generation of seventeenth-century American Puritans. Arguing that insufficient scrutiny has been given this important oeuvre, he calls for a reevaluation of the imaginative and creative qualities of America's early literature of inspired ecclesiological experiment, one that focuses on the quality of the works as well as the demanding theology they express. Colacurcio gives a detailed, richly contextualized account of the meaning of these "e;godly letters"e; in rhetorical, theological, and political terms. From his close readings of the major texts by the first generation of Puritans-including William Bradford, Thomas Hooker, Edward Johnson, John Winthrop, Thomas Shepard, and John Cotton-he expertly illuminates qualities other studies have often overlooked. In his words, close study of the literature yields work "e;comprehensive, circumspect, determined subtle, energetic, relentlessly intellectual, playful in spite of their cultural prohibitions, in spite of themselves, even, they are in every way remarkable products of a culture that . . . assigned an extraordinarily high place to the life of words."e; Magisterial in sweep, Godly Letters is likely to stand as the definitive work on the Puritan literary achievement.

In this celebrated analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Michael J. Colacurcio presents a view of the author as America’s first significant intellectual historian. Colacurcio shows that Hawthorne’s fiction responds to a wide range of sermons, pamphlets, and religious tracts and debates—a variety of moral discourses at large in the world of provincial New England.Informed by comprehensive historical research, the author shows that Hawthorne was steeped in New England historiography, particularly the sermon literature of the seventeenth century. But, as Colacurcio shows, Hawthorne did not merely borrow from the historical texts he deliberately studied; rather, he is best understood as having written history. In The Province of Piety, originally published in 1984 (Harvard University Press), Hawthorne is seen as a moral historian working with fictional narratives—a writer brilliantly involved in examining the moral and political effects of Puritanism in America and recreating the emotional and cultural contexts in which earlier Americans had lived.

This work shows how the spirit and forms of liberalism are a necessary but by no means sufficient explanation for the flowering of literature in 19th-century New England. The work of writers such as Melville, Hawthorne and Emily Dickinson is seen as in many ways the literary remnant of puritanism.