If the reader doesn’t mind Michael Colacurcio’s unorthodox approach in Hawthorne’s Histories, Hawthorne’s World: From Salem to Somewhere Else (2022), then the reward is thirteen rich chapters on Hawthorne’s process of writing, his cultural sources, and his narratology. The book ranges from his early years to the later, Italian stays in the late 1850s and The English Notebooks period. Ostensibly, per Colacurcio’s comments in the introduction, the book seeks to trace Hawthorne’s writing sites and the centrality in his fiction of place, particularly “his ancestral Salem” (9). The reader should forgive Colacurcio, as I do, for not fully following through on that place-based edict—at least not in a rigorously studied way. Just as Hawthorne’s narrators are invariably hiding some part of their inner self and perceptive capabilities, so too Colacurcio himself, makes this pronouncement, only to take his argumentative scope in a different, yet at least equally rewarding, direction. Instead,...
