Volume 7, Number 4 · September 22, 1966
Hawthorne in Analysis
By Philip Rahv
The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes
by Frederick C. Crews
Oxford, 279 pp., $6.75
Hawthorne: A Collection of Critical Essays
edited by A.N. Kaul
Prentice Hall, 182 pp., $3.95
One cannot speak of Hawthorne these days without observing that of all the classic American writers he is perhaps the one least understood by the academic scholarship and criticism of our time. It is to be hoped, therefore, that Mr. Crews's book, with its unabashedly and relentlessly Freudian analysis of what really goes on beneath the didactic surface of his fiction, will induce serious misgivings in the circle of Hawthorne specialists and lead to a significant revision of the genteel orthodoxies they now find so serviceable. But somehow I doubt it.
Review, 2564 words
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