Blackwell Reference Online

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Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly, – making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility, – is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests … A child's shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse; – whatever, in a word, has been used or played with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other. ( Hawthorne [1850] 1986: 35) Hawthorne's meditations could perhaps best be paraphrased by Elissa Greenwald's observation that “romance reveals the margin of reality which is transformed by consciousness. That consciousness is, of course, historically constructed and partly determined by ideology” (1989: 7). Although the propensity for romance in the American novel was singled out early by authors such as William Gilmore Simms, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry James, the actual romance theory of American fiction was elaborated in the mid-twentieth century by critics such as F. O. Mathiessen, ... log in or subscribe to read full text