The Marble Faun (Dover Thrift Editions) Paperback - 2004
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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.
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 (Dover Thrift Editions)
- Author Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Binding Paperback
- Publisher Dover Publications
- Date 6/4/2004
- ISBN 9784864341172