Hawthorne, History, and Politics: A Reassessment

This essay revisits Nathaniel Hawthorne’s theory of history and its implications for his political imagination in light of recent reassessments of historicist methods across the humanities. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s concept of “worldliness” as well as recent literary critical reevaluations of historicism by Rita Felski and Jeffrey Insko, the essay traces Hawthorne’s literary and intellectual development in the late 1840s and early 1850s to highlight how Hawthorne was, in fact, highly critical of the kinds of teleological theories of history that scholars have long attributed to him. In doing so, the essay seeks not only to revise the notion that Hawthorne was an inherently conservative political thinker, but also to show how a more interdisciplinary engagement with moral and political thought can deepen literary studies’ understanding of the political implications involved in rethinking historicist approaches to literature.