The indefatigable Monika Elbert has done it again: assembled a collection of thirty-five essays prefaced by her own introduction and accompanied by twenty-three illustrations, notes on contributors, a list of further readings for each essay, and a thorough index. The contributors include seasoned emeritus and distinguished professors to younger professors and several international Hawthorne scholars. All have published widely on Hawthorne and applied their skills in the several schools of Hawthorne criticism that developed from 1960 to the present, giving the collection the richness of differing views and critical methods. Elbert divides the book into five categories whose subheadings I use in this review. Each section contains six to eight essays averaging ten pages each plus notes and a short bibliography, a useful arrangement that allows students and scholars to read selectively. Although most of Hawthorne's fiction is represented many times over, leading to considerable repetition of plot, characters, and themes, the essays cover material from all twenty-three volumes of The Centenary Edition, The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, dozens of biographies, and a wide range of scholarly criticism.A key rationale for this collection is the connection between text and context. The ascendance of theory has not quelled the desire to ground literary analysis in actuality, much as Hawthorne oscillated between imagination and event. As rich as these essays are, not all of them succeed in balancing the real (remember the book Hawthorne and the Real?), the tangible world of lived experience, with the ideal, the more amorphous inspiration that drives writers to create fictional versions of events. The best criticism connects one with the other, tethering, to paraphrase Henry James in his preface to The American, the long rope of reality to the balloon of experience that suspends the car of the imagination. All contributors to this volume are well versed in Hawthorne's fiction, and most have a firm grasp of issues that surrounded him during his life. Yet sometimes textual analysis overtakes context and fails to demonstrate Hawthorne's acquaintance with his cultural surround. To say Hawthorne “must have” known a certain book or journal or newspaper article diminishes the authority of context and evades a clear connection between art and life. In contrast, the most persuasive essays provide convincing examples of Hawthorne's interest in slavery, science, editing, sentimentality, and nature, to list some recurrent contexts, and assume that readers are reasonably if not intimately familiar with the texts. Besides leading us to new sources, influences, and background for his major works, these efforts raise the profile of Hawthorne's less-anthologized publications and put more balloons in the air than James had ropes. While I will cover all the essays in this collection, I will say a bit more about those essays that, in my view, do the best job of aligning Hawthorne's work with cultural changes and events he encountered.Michael J. Colacurcio begins with the early Puritan tales of the Salem period, notably “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Minister's Black Veil,” two of the gloomiest stories in the Hawthorne canon. He places them in the well-known arguments for spectral evidence and rigid adherence to Puritan doctrine to portray the horrors of Puritan behavior. Justly aghast at the sternness of Puritan religiosity, Colacurcio then turns to the political side of Puritanism as a precursor of the American revolution in such tales as “The Gentle Boy” and “Legends of the Province-House.” He offers perceptive readings of these and later tales but might have mentioned such contexts as the demise of Federalism, the rise of evangelicalism, or the grudging acceptance of science, cultural shifts that undermined Puritanism. Derek Pacheco offers more concrete contexts for Hawthorne's revolutionary tales by focusing on what John McWilliams has called “the loyalist dilemma,” the conflict between pursuing American nationalism while trying to retain the best of English culture and institutions. Pacheco references historical events such as General Howe's exit from the siege of Boston in 1776 in “Howe's Masquerade” and chief justice Peter Oliver's dismissal from his post in “The Tory's Lament.” As with Robin Molineux's shock at the treatment of his kinsman, Pacheco finds Hawthorne sympathizing with his Tory relative as he confronts ignominy and exile. In these and similar tales, Hawthorne seeded his patriotism with sentiment for loyalists even as he emphasized “social stability and continuity of cultural inheritance” (42) as evidenced in his lack of regard for women, African Americans, and Native Americans.Three essays examine Hawthorne's views on slaves, ethnic groups, and Native Americans. In “Slavery and the Civil War,” Larry J. Reynolds attributes Hawthorne's “early lack of concern about slavery” (58) to his pacifism and disdain for violence. This position led him as late as 1851 to express his racism in a letter to his Salem friend Zachariah (not Zachary) Burchmore when he confessed to not having “the slightest sympathy for the slaves; or, at least, not half so much as for the laboring whites” (62). Contextual details like this confirm Reynolds's view that “Hawthorne clearly shared the racism prevalent among all white Americans during the antebellum period, including the abolitionists” (59), and explains Hawthorne's mixed views on abolitionism, the Fugitive Slave Act, the opinions of his Concord neighbors, and presidential politics, major political issues at the time. Leonardo Buonomo cites similar quotations in “Ethnicity and Race” and, like Reynolds, finds Hawthorne betraying “the prejudices and racism he shared with the majority of his white middle-class contemporaries” (68). Buonomo cites numerous instances of “racial condescension” in Hawthorne's fiction, such as Scipio in The House of the Seven Gables, yet also notes his tolerance for some European immigrants, as his notebooks and travel sketches reveal. French and Swiss settlers contrast favorably with the shanty Irish, particularly women, and the young Italian organ grinder outside the Pyncheon dwelling brings the beauty of music to his new country in contrast to the Irish who take something away, namely jobs. In the third essay, “Native American Presence,” Laura J. Mielke believes Hawthorne “could not have avoided” news about the “Indian question” of 1829–32 (46) yet adduces few facts to support this knowledge, in contrast to the rich contexts Pacheco and Reynolds relate. She nevertheless finds an “insistent, if unsteady, presence of Nativeness across his writings” (55) that is more symbolic or iconic than thematically influential.In a more politicized context on “Women's Rights,” Nancy F. Sweet finds the persistence of “True Womanhood” in Hawthorne's early stories—think Faith and Dorcas—and charts his characteristically quiet intermixing of “normative feminine ideals with attributes antithetical to the True Womanhood stereotype” (94)—think Phoebe, Priscilla, and Hilda. While Sweet cites the cultural influence of Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, their influence is not well developed. More sharply, Joel Pfister begins “Capitalism and Class” with specific data on the rise of class divisions in the 1820s and describes how they surface in Hawthorne's sketches and tales set in the present, such as “The Procession of Life” and “The New Adam and Eve.” He links these to Hawthorne's time in the Boston and Salem customhouses where he confronted issues that drove him deeper into psychological and creative privacy in the face of soulless systemic capitalist oppression. Against this well-drawn background, Pfister's inspired choice of “The Artist of the Beautiful” emerges as a text that speaks back to symbols of industrial power that crush bejeweled butterflies but justify, with Owen Warland's enigmatic smile, the value of personal creativity. Martin Kevorkian has the unenviable task of contextualizing “Hawthorne's Religion,” which puzzled even Hawthorne himself. In “Monsieur du Miroir,” Kevorkian sees Hawthorne becoming “his own minister,” giving him confidence to develop what Reynolds calls his own “rare democratic spirit of Christianity” (110) and distinguishing his more orthodox beliefs from Emerson's. Although Hawthorne seldom attended church, he retained the terminology and compassion of genuine Christianity as evident in Hilda and Phoebe and many others.Three essays under this rubric evidence Hawthorne's engagement with popular culture and tie him somewhat more closely to his milieu. Margaret Jay Jessee's superbly informative essay on “Melodrama and Drama” connects theater and literature by comparing melodrama's “democratic spirit” and “combination of realism and romance” to Hawthorne's famous “neutral territory,” an aesthetic stand-in that keeps audiences on edge. Biographies and letters record his enjoyment of melodrama, Shakespeare, and famous thespians and influence stories such as “Young Goodman Brown” and “Rappaccini's Daughter.” These tales follow the basic structures of melodrama and then modify it by creating liminal spaces that deviate from the predictable triumph of innocence over evil, precisely the ambiguity that gives Hawthorne's writing lasting power. These and other tales “blend the fear of the metaphysical … with the social ills plaguing nineteenth-century material reality” (160), Jessee adds, and leave readers seeking answers in Hawthorne's calculated webs of uncertainty. His four novels all contain theatrical scenes that borrow from melodrama's deployment of silence, moral instruction, romance, and explicit performances by the characters, for example, Priscilla's role as the “Veiled Lady.” Samuel Coale follows up by describing the popularity of mesmerism, something Hawthorne considered the most dangerous of all pseudosciences, one that threatened our powers of sympathy and theological certainties. Robert Collyer, a well-known mesmerist-cum-phrenologist, turns up in “The Hall of Fantasy,” and his actual performances foreshadow Holgrave's and Westervelt's in their respective novels. These two essays provide a rich context for Kristin Boudreau's work on film adaptations of The Scarlet Letter and its many iterations in the twentieth century, a topic that says more about current tastes than Hawthorne's.More closely aligned to “social movements” of the antebellum era are three essays on utopianism, the city, and gender roles. Evert Jan van Leeuwen offers a perceptive view of Hawthorne as a “utopian satirist,” particularly after he read Gulliver's Travels and perhaps More's Utopia, let alone survived the idealistic communitarians of Brook Farm. “The Hall of Fantasy” collects multiple ironic comments on utopianism, The Scarlet Letter indulges in “punitive satire” directed toward Puritanism, and The Blithedale Romance riffs on Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia as Hawthorne came to accept “that utopia is located in the imagination, not reality” (121). Ellen Weinauer tracks the rapid growth of cities in Hawthorne's America and draws a fine line between their appeal and their artificiality. By considering his characters as flaneurs versed in rural and urban observation, Weinauer suggests that Hawthorne developed an “integrative vision” (141) that combines the rewards found in both locales. David Greven points to Hawthorne's expressed admiration of Andrew Jackson as a “model of male authority that otherwise receives such a stern critique in his oeuvre” (151), an irony that seeps into relationships such as the “perverse male marriage” between Dimmesdale and Chillingworth (150) and leads Hawthorne to sympathize with women's fraught position in Jacksonian culture, notably in his characters Hester, Hepzibah, Zenobia, and Miriam.Four of these six essays explore the publishing norms during the 1830s and 1840s that sometimes helped and often hindered Hawthorne's lifelong desire to publish despite the custom of anonymous, often-unremunerated publication. Using a mix of Hawthorne's correspondence, relations with editors, and publication in a variety of newspapers, annuals, and journals, this cluster of studies stresses his sensitivity to audiences and his willingness to borrow and reprint content from other sources. David Cody provides exhaustive lists of Hawthorne's borrowings from other magazines to flesh out The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge; Lesley Ginsberg stresses his struggle with “a print culture that valued conformity, repetition, and the didactic” (196); and Laura Laffrado explains his turn to children's literature that succeeded partly due to Elizabeth Peabody's assistance in negotiating deals with publishers. In a beautifully written article on “Literary Sketches,” Kristie Hamilton describes Hawthorne as an “urbane flaneur” (223) who insulates his inner self from his outward vision so he can construct detached, panoramic observations of modern reality. But she also notes that he was “quite aware that the model of aloof spectatorship was a fiction,” as in “Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent,” which encourages compassion “as a counter to the chilling effects of living only through the apparatus of the eye” (226).On a much broader topic Leland S. Person reviews the “American Romance” through the familiar lenses of Hawthorne's prefaces and extant scholarship on the genre and stresses the “actual” in Hawthorne's last two completed novels, both of which border on the metafictional and test his “romance theory of creativity” (248). Magnus Ullén examines the “Unfinished Romances” by following Charles Swann's argument that the Civil War so detached America from England that Hawthorne's English romance became impossible. Ullén turns to Septimius Felton, perhaps the most complete of the late manuscripts, and grimly sees it as deconstructing “not merely the possibility of personal immortality, but that of national immortality as well” (258).These eight essays divide nicely in half, four studies of Hawthorne's use of other writers and four placing him in discrete literary genres. Michael Cody surveys the well-known forebears Scott, Irving, and Brockden Brown as influential “Romantic Predecessors” of Hawthorne's interest in history, literary sketches, and the Gothic, respectively, a well-worn path made dustier by his reliance on such early critics as George Woodberry, Nelson Adkins, Fred Pattee, and Vernon Parrington. Richard Kopley deploys Poe's widely varying reviews to foreground the comments that drove Hawthorne to place Poe in “The Hall of Fantasy” as imaginative but unfortunately “belonging to the obnoxious class of critics” (277). Later Hawthorne wrote Poe, “I admire you rather as a writer of Tales, than as a critic upon them” (279), a sentiment that may have led to Poe's devastating 1846 review of “Mosses from an Old Manse.” Kopley concludes by noting numerous allusions to Poe in language and characterization in Hawthorne's first three novels. Les Harrison makes good use of the famous Hawthorne-Melville correspondence of 1850–52, as well as other documents, to peer into both their literary and personal relationship. “The result,” Harrison argues, “is a textually mediated relationship” wherein their writings act “as a filter through which they experience their friendship” (290). With somewhat less conviction than Kopley's search for Poe in Hawthorne, Harrison finds several possible allusions to Hawthorne in Melville and reminds us “that their friendship was interrupted and not terminated” (293). “The Celestial Railroad” gets a good working over in Jonathan W. Murphy's assessment of Hawthorne's allegiance to transcendental idealism, notably in the parody of Immanuel Kant as the “Giant Transcendentalist.” Although Hawthorne and Emerson were friends, the former was more practical regarding philosophy's ability to improve the human condition. As with slavery, Hawthorne placed metaphysical issues in the hands of divine providence rather than reformers. Murphy views the tragic idealist Hollingsworth as “typical of Emerson” (303), while Hawthorne approved of the general ideals of transcendentalism but pragmatically refused to carry them out.The other four essays contextualize Hawthorne in the literary genres of sentimentality, American Gothic, science fiction, and magical realism. Compared to the more tangible contexts of the first four essays, these contributors deal in literary themes and motifs popular in the period. In a smart and complex essay, Marianne Noble quotes from an 1841 issue of Arcturus (a short-lived review edited by Evert Duyckinck and Cornelius Mathews, may I add) that defines sentimentality as idealistic, delicate, and truthful, in contrast to sentiment, which lacks all three. She cites Hawthorne's reading at Bowdoin in the Scottish Common Sense tradition of moral philosophy and finds it informing his work as well as that of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Julia Ward Howe, and other women writers. The complexity arises when one sorts out Hawthorne's admiration for women writers from his flaming critiques of them. According to Noble, Hawthorne believed that any emotional coercion destroys the “individual soul” and limits the reader's “emotional freedom,” what he called the “truth of the human heart” (315). Alfred Bendixen places Hawthorne's Gothic closer to Irving's historical tales than Poe's misty locales, a combination of myth and history with a sprinkling of the supernatural that makes Hawthorne's stories more definitively American, especially his early Puritan tales. In defining science fiction, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock wisely points out that one age's fantasy (I suggest heart surgery or space travel) is another age's science. He surveys the expected stories that involve mad scientists, mesmerism, and psychological violations of personal autonomy and sees in “The Artist of the Beautiful” Hawthorne's distinction between a science that seeks to control and one that liberates. Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso cites Hawthorne's theory of romance as a starting point for a distinctively Latin American magical realism rooted in Hawthorne's formulation of the “Actual and the Imaginary” but leaning more toward the actual in what Alejo Carpentier terms the “marvelous real.” In a good example of transnational literary cultures, Miguel-Alfonso describes Hawthorne as “opening a path for a renewal of fiction” across national boundaries (347–48).Patricia Dunlavy Valenti contextualizes Hawthorne's views on marriage based on communitarian experiments such as the “plural marriages” of the Latter Day Saints, the polyamorous couplings of the Oneida community, and the celibacy practiced by the Shakers, a sect that both fascinated and disgusted Hawthorne when he realized men slept together in a single bed. Although Valenti does not mention “The Shaker Bridal” and other tales that portray bizarre marriages, she focuses effectively on the novels and finds evidence of unconventional relationships that imply his tolerance of “homosocial (if not specifically homosexual) relationships” (161). Frederick Newberry cogently reviews the long chain of “Hawthorne's Biographers” and takes no prisoners in his disdain for Freudian interpretations that led Julian Hawthorne to defend his father from “the charge of possessing a ‘monstrous shyness’” (367). Newberry prefers the less thesis-ridden biographies of Randall Stewart, Arlin Turner, James R. Mellow, Robert Cantwell, and Margaret Moore, who place Hawthorne among lifelong friends such as Horatio Bridge, Zachariah Burchmore, Longfellow, Fuller, and Pierce rather than psychoanalyzing their subject.Four additional essays describe the effects of place in Hawthorne's career, an interesting take on how he perceived and evaluated natural landscapes, New England villages, England, and Italy. Steven Petersheim cites numerous instances where Hawthorne accepts “nonhuman nature” as reality instead of “being a mere projection of human consciousness” (378) and points to his decade of travels after college and his various residences in Maine, Salem, Concord, and the Berkshires. Views of nature are always mediated, Petersheim says, and his nonfiction especially brings him closest to being “an environmental writer” (383). Melissa McFarland Pennell skips over Hawthorne's time in the Berkshires and Boston to offer colorful, specific details of his socializing in Salem, Raymond, Brunswick, and Concord during his youth and middle age. She chronicles the population growth of Salem and Hawthorne's excursions into the woods along with his historical research in the Salem Athenaeum and Essex Institute and his managerial role in Salem's Lyceum series. When he returned in 1860 to Concord after his time abroad, political changes in America had outraced his views of slavery and secession as the village shifted toward abolitionism, leaving Hawthorne an outsider in his former community. In “Hawthorne and England,” James Hewiston argues that “the idea of England was used … as a means of analyzing inadequacies in the American identity” (397), a good thesis but one difficult to develop in eight pages. Hewiston focuses on Our Old Home and the “American Claimant” manuscript, along with the late correspondence, a tactic that necessarily relies on text rather than context. Even more textual is Rita Bode's “Hawthorne in Italy,” which quotes from both The French and Italian Notebooks and, rather excessively, The Marble Faun. More context might have shored up her initial thesis that “Italy encouraged rather than assuaged his ambivalences, muddled his clarity, and compromised his ability to draw distinctions” (407), an outcome that other critics of this period have contested.While some theorists believe that cultural norms constitute an overwhelming influence on the art and writing of an era, as they undoubtedly do in part, the fluidity and dynamism of nineteenth-century America offered multiple and rapidly changing social ideologies that constituted an enormous resource for creativity and innovation. The contributors to this volume recognize that fact and diligently unravel the effects of Hawthorne's experiences on his art, whether it be the rural isolation of Bowdoin, the idealism of Brook Farm, his unwavering loyalty to Franklin Pierce, or the other social and ideological contexts that shaped his values. The more these contexts depart from convention and the more specifically they are described, the more they demonstrate Hawthorne's ability to meld them into a long and influential career as one of America's canonical authors. Enough of these essays achieve a level of scholarly insight to warrant placing this volume on every Hawthornean's bookshelf or, more economically, accessing it online through your institution.