The Power of Historical Knowledge

Narrating the Past in Hawthorne, James, and Dreiser

Susan L. Mizruchi

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780691603162, 9780691632568
• eBook ISBN: 9781400859191
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this provocative study, Susan Mizruchi argues that the act of writing history is the key to the political concerns of American novelists. Using nineteenth-century theories of history as well as recent narratological models, she examines reconstructions of the past in The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Bostonians (1886), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and An American Tragedy (1925). Her special focus allows us to see that the efforts (on the part of characters and narrators alike) to reshape the past reveal both anxieties about the self and larger struggles for political power.

Professor Mizruchi demonstrates the deepening connections between narrative and political coercion from Hawthorne to Dreiser, whose novels (as she further shows) both incorporate, and portray their characters incorporating, the conditions of their contemporary worlds. Her argument addresses a major contemporary dialogue on the subversive qualities of American texts and the place of history in literary interpretation.

Originally published in 1988.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Problem of History in American Literature
• 2. The Problem of History in American Historiography
• 3. From History to Gingerbread: Manufacturing a Republic in the House of the Seven Gables
• 4. The Politics of Temporality in the Bostonians
• 5. American Innocence and English Perils: The Treachery of Tales in the Wings of the Dove
• 6. The Power of Mere Fable: Reconstructing the Past in an American Tragedy
• Bibliography
• Index