1st Edition

Hawthorne's Romances Social Drama and the Metaphor of Geometry

By Robert S. Friedman Copyright 2000
    206 Pages
    by Routledge

    206 Pages
    by Routledge

    First Published in 2000. Throughout the nineteenth century, the study of geometry remained at the core of educational curricula in the United States, strongly affecting how educated Americans construed their world. This book examines how each of Nathaniel Hawthorne's romances presents a different geometric figure that becomes representative of the work's themes and narrative designs. These geometric figures, when approached from the perspective of Victor Turner's symbolic anthropology, server as cultural mediators, combining geometric symbology with a unique narrative perspective to offer metaphors of personal and cultural boundaries, Freidman presents the literary text as the point of intersection among such disciplines as cultural anthropology, history, mathematics and American literature.

    Chapter 1 Hawthorne, Geometry and Social Drama; Chapter 2 The Circle of My Glance; Chapter 3 I Am Not the Fool You Take Me for; Chapter 4 The Sphere of Thought and Feeling; Chapter 5 The Topsy-Turvy Commonwealth of Sleep; Chapter 6 The Epoch of Annihilated Space; Chapter 7 Into This Labyrinth of Darkness;

    Biography

    Robert S. Freidman New Jersey Institute of Technology Newark, New Jersey, USA