American Literature

Paper Summary:

This paper contends that, through literature, writers subjectively interpret their realities as they experience and perceive them, expressing these realities to other people in the form of prose or poem. The paper discusses and analyzes these subjective realities and feelings about human life in the works of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson.

From the Paper:

"Melville is not alone in his analysis of Hawthorne's works. Hawthorne himself describes his writing and being a writer as an "...attempt to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us....pure and uncontrollable mischief...the folly of tumbling down...until an accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms." This passage from the preface of Hawthorne's novel "The House of the Seven Gables" brings into lucidity the fact that humanity, stripped of its conventions and norms of morality, shall "tumble down" and be "scattered...in its original atoms"-that is, humanity shall return to its most natural state, a condition wherein human mind and behavior has no limits, wherein death and insanity is preferred over life and sanity."

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