Wuthering
Expectations

My favorite Hawthorne story is "The Artist of the Beautiful" (1844), an allegory about Hawthorne's own creative life. An inven...

Hawthorne’s more or less allegorical stories are not populated by what I would call rounded or real characters. I don’t exactly mean psychol...

What to do with these allegories? Some of Hawthorne’s most famous stories seem extremely simple-minded, with banal morals. “Young Goodman Br...

I mentioned yesterday that most selections of Hawthorne’s stories omit his dull “concept plus list” tales, a significant (in quantity, not q...

I admire, obviously, the Library of America project . They publish such attractive books. But they are not ideally suited for the Neurotic R...

The peasants in The Devil's Pool do not sound much like peasants. They speak in long, flowing paragraphs, like they're in La Nouvel...

The Devil's Pool is short, only 140 pages in the antique Everyman's Library edition I read. How strange, then to discover that the ...

Everywhere I look, in everything I read, things are going great. Or they go great for a while, but then something bad happens. Or they'r...

Typee was Herman Melville’s first novel, and his first best-seller. It was all downhill from there for poor Melville. The editor of the New...

Moby-Dick was Herman Melville's sixth novel. Typee (1846) is his first. They are all sea novels, more or less. These are the only two ...

Theodor Storm wrote on a small scale - novellas and short tales, and lyric poems, mostly set in and around the country where he grew up. He ...

My attempts to think about the achievement of Theodor Storm have been a failure. His art is too agile; it's slipped way from me. I am su...

I guess the title of Theodor Storm's A Quiet Musician (1875) is not exactly a paradox. But a musician should not be too quiet. The cent...

"'But who composed these lovely songs?" asked Elisabeth. 'Oh,' said Erich, 'you can hear it in the little dittie...

Theodor Storm's Immensee (1850), aka The Lake of the Bees , is almost too delicate to write about. It's too beautiful, too sweet, t...

A Longfellow poem contemporary with Evangeline : I shot an arrow into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For, so swiftly it flew, ...

Hawthorne's Evangeline , not quite the same as Longfellow's: "H. L. Conolly heard from a French Canadian a story of a young cou...

The Wikipedia entry for dactylic hexameter includes two English examples. One is from - hey, look at that - Evangeline , the (sort of) famo...

"Thatched were the roofs, with dormer-windows; and gables projecting Over the basement below protected and shaded the doorway." Th...

I have followed my own advice and read a volume of the Clay Sanskrit Library . Ashvaghosha's Life of the Buddha (1st or 2nd century) w...