Somewhat on the Community System: Representations of Fourierism in the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Studies in Major Literary Authors) - Hardcover

Loman, Andrew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0415975514 ISBN 13: 9780415975513

Publisher: Routledge, 2005

Synopsis

Hawthorne wrote much of his major fiction in the decade that the theories of Charles Marie François 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

About this title

About the Author

Andrew Loman

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0415975514
• ISBN 13: 9780415975513
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 184