The House of The Seven Gables

"Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) once clearly stated his preference for The House of the Seven Gables (1851) over his now better-known work, The Scarlet Letter (1850). This Critical Edition is intended to give the students an authoritative text as well as access to a selection from the wide range of scholarship on The House of the Seven Gables. The Introduction gives a broad overview and contains sections on seminal issues in the novel such as the Puritan history of New England, the ""romance"" genre, and the gothic interest of the novel. The text has been annotated to provide clarification and additional information. A section on Biographical and Historical Contexts covers a diversity of topics including a biographical sketch of Hawthorne, early responses to Hawthorne and his works including those by Melville and Henry James, a rebuttal by Lionel Trilling of James's evaluation of Hawthorne, and an essay on Puritanism. An integrated timeline relates the facts of the author's life with information on American history as it pertains to The House of the Seven Gables. • The Critical Essays section includes material from over a century of Hawthorne scholarship: from Henry James (1879) and F.O. Matthiessen (1941) to Nina Baym (2004). Special care has been taken to represent the broad range of issues brought out by the critics, and clarify topics such as daguerreotype and mesmerism, which are central to the novel but no longer familiar to contemporary readers. NITA N. KUMAR is an Associate Professor of English at Shyama Prasad Mukherji College, University of Delhi. She holds a Ph. D. in American Literature and has been a recipient of Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship at Yale University. Her research articles have appeared in African American Review, Black Arts Quarterly, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Theatre India: National School of Drama's Theatre Journal as well as in books."