Description: Roughly half of the essays focus on biographical issues; the others take literary perspectives. The essays are informed by a variety of critical approaches, as well as by new historical insights and new understandings of the possibilities that existed for male friendships in nineteenth-century American culture.
Brief description: LELAND S. PERSON is a professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. His books include The Cambridge Introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Review Quotes:
This engaging--sometimes even moving--collection produces a compelling, multidirectional dialogue about how readers might understand the substance of the provocatively cryptic relationship between Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Whatever their answers, the essays included here manage to convey the critical liveliness that each scholar brings to the incomplete dialogue between these two centrally important U.S. writers.
--Dana D. Nelson "Vanderbilt University"