Description:
New York. 1961. December 1961. Signet/New American Library. 1st Signet Classic Paperback Edition. Very Good in Wrappers. 0451501128. Afterword By Murray Kreiger. 346 pages. paperback. CD112. Cover: Lambert. keywords: Signet Classic Literature America 19th Century Paperback. FROM THE PUBLISHER - Henry James wrote of The Marble Faun: 'Hawthorne has done few things more beautiful than the picture of the unequal complicity of guilt between his immature and dimly - puzzled hero, with his clinging, unquestioning, unexacting devotion, and the dark, powerful, more widely - seeing feminine nature of Miriam. If the book contained nothing else noteworthy but. the murder committed by Donatello under Miriam's eyes and the ecstatic wandering, afterward, of the guilty couple through the 'bloodstained streets of Rome,' it would still deserve to rank high among the imaginative productions of our day.' The cosmopolitanism of this novel foreshadows one of the most important themes in our literature -…
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About this book
The fragility-and the durability-of human life and art dominate this story of American expatriates in Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. Befriended by Donatello, a young Italian with the classical grace of the "Marble Faun," Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon find their pursuit of art taking a sinister turn as Miriam's unhappy past precipitates the present into tragedy.
Hawthorne's 'International Novel' dramatizes the confrontation of the Old World and the New and the uncertain relationship between the 'authentic' and the 'fake' in life as in art. The author's evocative descriptions of classic sites made The Marble Faun a favorite guidebook to Rome for Victorian tourists, but this richly ambiguous symbolic romance is also the story of a murder, and a parable of the Fall of Man. As the characters find their civilized existence disrupted by the awful consequences of impulse, Hawthorne leads his readers to question the value of Art and Culture and addresses the great evolutionary debate which was beginning to shake Victorian society.
Summary
Hawthorne's novel of Americans abroad, the first novel to explore the influence of European cultural ideas on American morality. Although it is set in Rome, the fictive world of The Marble Faun depends not on Italy's social or historical significance, but rather on its aesthetic importance as a definer of 'civilization'. As in The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne is concerned here with the nature of transgression and guilt. A murder, motivated by love, affects not only Donatello, the murderer, but his beloved Miriam and their friends Hilda and Kenyon. As he explores the reactions of each to the crime, Hawthorne dramatizes both the freedoms a new cultural model inspires and the self-censoring conformities it requires. His examination of the influence of European culture on American travellers lay the groundwork for such later works of American fiction as Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad and Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady.
First Edition Identification
Ticknor and Fields published a First Printing, First Edition in Boston, 1860. The hardcovers are bound in brown cloth and include 16 pages of ads dated February 1860.
Details
- Title The Marble Faun
- Author Hawthorne, Nathaniel
- Binding Paperback
- Language EN
- Publisher Signet Classics
- Date June 1, 1968
- ISBN 9780451501127
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