Binding: Hardcover
Description: Hawthorne wrote much of his major fiction in the decade that the theories of Charles Marie Fran ois Fourier crossed the Atlantic and contributed to a wave of communitarian experimentation in the American North. Famously Hawthorne briefly lived and worked at Brook Farm a Transcendentalist commune that formally converted to Fourierism when he had left and was embroiled in litigation to recover money he had invested in the community. In his fiction Hawthorne responded directly to Fourierism and its critique of capitalism. He used his experiences at Brook Farm as the inspiration for The Blithedale Romance and in The House of the Seven Gables cast one of the principal characters as a recovering Fourierist. In The Scarlet Letter he engaged with Fourierist debates on marriage and the regulation of desire. Somewhat on the Community - System examines these interventions and argues that Hawthorne's fiction both seeks to contain Fourierism and responds to its allure. Moreover in formulating alternative morally acceptable utopias (ones that are predicated on middle - class marriage) Hawthorne's fiction appropriates key aspects of Fourierist theory
Title: Somewhat On The Community System Representations Of Fourierism In The Works Of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Author(s): Loman Andrew
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Barcode: 9780415975513
Pages: 184 Pages
Publication Date: 8/30/2005
Series: Studies in Major Literary Authors
Category: Literature: History & Criticism