Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Tradition of the Gothic Romance. by Jane LundbladReview by: Elizabeth W. ManwaringModern Language Notes, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Apr., 1948), pp. 288-289Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2908588 .

Accessed: 28/06/2014 13:06

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toModern Language Notes.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 78.24.220.173 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 13:06:05 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

288 MODERN LANGUAGE NOTES, APRIL, 1948

hampered, as he himself indicates, by "gaps in our knowledge which must be filled before any important synthesis can be made in the field of soutbern literature." His indication of the extensive- ness of the uncollected and unedited prose of the South should be stimulating to students of American Literature.

ROBERT D. JACOBS Johns Hopkins University

Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Tradition of the Gothic Romance. By JANE LUNDBLAD. (Essays and studies in American Language and Literature, No. 4. Upsala, A- and B-Lunde- quistka Bokh.) Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Uni- versity Press. 1946.

Miss Lundblad's study of Hawthorne as, to a far greater degree than is generally realized, a borrower from the Gothic romances of Mirs. Radcliffe, Lewis and Mathurin, is the fourth study to come from the American Institute at Upsala. That the director of the Institute and editor of the series is the distinguished Professor S. B. Liljegren, well known in this country, is guarantee of their interest. Professor Liljegren is probably the pioneer promoter in Europe of studies in American philology, and of American civilization as a subject important for Europeans.

Miss Lundblad presents for her European readers a brief account of Hawthorne's background, compiles, from the studies of A. MI. Killen and He'lene Richter and from Professor Liljegren's lectures a list of recurring elements in the English Gothic romances which are borrowed by Hawthorne, and shows how he combines these ele- ments of the fantastic and supernatural with native American set- tings and traditions. Checking such Gothic elements as the castle, the mysterious manuscript, the work of art, Italians, ghosts, magic, blood, against each of Hawthorne's works in chronological order, she establishes the fascination which these held for Hawthorne, from his crude youthful borrowings wholesale, through the short stories and four novels which present skilful adaptations of the strange and supernatural to conditions in his own land and in Italy, and at last to the various final fragments in which appear not only such hackneyed elements as a castle, an Italian, a Jesuit, a wizard, a strange wine,-but such wild grotesqueries as a bloody footstep and a huge spider.

Miss Lundblad is modestly content to give the facts, and not try to derive from them conclusions as to Hawthorne's flagging energy and taste. She recognizes frankly the limitations of her study of the Gothic romances to secondary sources. Within these

This content downloaded from 78.24.220.173 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 13:06:05 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

REVIEWS 289

limitations she has worked with intelligence and thoroughness, and has achieved a study both useful in itself and valuable as a por- trayal of a great American as he appears to Scandinavian eyes.

ELIZABETH W. MANWARING Wellesley College

BRIEF MENTION

Johann Gottfried Herder, Journal meiner Reise im Jahre 1769. Edited by A. GILLIES (Blackwell's German Texts. General Editor: J. Boyd), Oxford: 1947. Pp. xli + 173. 7/6. The Blackwell series has been augmented by several new editions during the last two years; I have before me Lessing's Eminlia Galotti by E. L. Stahl, Grillparzer's Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen by Douglas Yates, James Boyd's Notes to his edition of Goethe's Poems (which I shall review later) and the above mentioned Herder Diary by Alexander Gillies. The texts are tersely annotated and provided with introductions which, presupposing a general knowledge of the author's biography, devote their thirty to forty pages to an expert and scholarly discussion of the problem of the work, its literary setting and its artistic form and merit. They may well be used in our graduate classes and would save our blushing over the pony translations and elementary vocabularies on which our publishers insist since the old classics' editions have died out. As the Herder Diary is not accessible to our students in any separate edition, it should be especially welcome. Mr. Gillies' indispelnsable annota- tions do not stop at mere factual data but elucidate the text with references to contemporaneous authors and Herder's own writings. The introduction vivifies and clarifies the stormy conflict between contending thoughts and emotions which was fought in Herder's own soul during the writing of this early diary and beyond it dur- ing his whole life. The editor writes: We see before us a man struggling at once to escape from himself and to be himself; struggling like his country, for complete and settled self-ex- pression, in word arid life. He is in the toils of a problem that only time and experience can solve. Like a hero of Schiller's, he is the creature of circumstances he has himself created, he cannot cast off their effects or detach himself from their memory. His only course is to build in solitude upon their positive contribution to his growth and learn the lessons that failure has taught him. We know that the success with which Herder did so vas imperfect. His piercing self-analysis did not completely help him to chaange his life.

With all his compassionate admiration for the author Mr. Gillies never abandons a well balanced critical sense, which many Herder scholars are apt to lose. We are looking forward to his edition of

This content downloaded from 78.24.220.173 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 13:06:05 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions