Overview

In this ground-breaking comparative study of the major works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walker Percy, Elzbieta Oleksy explores the intrinsic affinities between the two writers that transcend regional and historical barriers. Fully researched, the book investigates the development of the writers' visions. Both Hawthorne and Percy gradually came to view the subjectivity of an individual as a form of self-realization inferior to the intersubjective communion between persons. Focusing on the personal encounters between Hawthorne's and Percy's female and male characters, the study re-examines gender roles in the two writers' fiction.

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9780820418483

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Reviews

A reader concerned with social issues of the present moment would perhaps not expect to see such strong similarities between nineteenth-century New England and twentieth-century South. It takes the kind of scholarship displayed by Professor Oleksy to reveal that ultimately fiction is not concerned with social issues, but with metaphysical or, more appropriate to her discourse, existential situations. (Lewis A. Lawson) ...the author has made a serious attempt to grapple with an important topic that needs discussion...Hawthorneans should find much material that deserves further exploration. (Nathaniel Hawthorne Review)

Author Information

The Author: Elzbieta H. Oleksy is an associate professor and director of the North American Studies Center and the Women's Studies Center, University of Lodz, Poland. She has also taught at the University of Pittsburgh, SUNY at Buffalo, and Southern Seminary College. She was a Recipient of a Fulbright grant in 1977-78, an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship in 1983, and the Kosciuszko Foundation scholarship in 1990. In addition to numerous articles in professional journals, both in Europe and the United States, she wrote Battle and Quest: The American Fable of the Nineteen Sixties.

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