Inchbald, Hawthorne and the Romantic Moral Romance: Little Histories and Neutral Territories (Literary Migrations) Book

This study explores the connections between British and American Romanticism, focusing on the novels of Elizabeth Inchbald (1753-1821) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64). Inchbald sought to legitimize herself as a serious author in a society that privileged male authorship. Fifty years later, Hawthorne struggled to establish an indigenous American literature in a British-dominated publishing world. Although the two authors wrote on opposite sides of the Atlantic and with different goals, they produced remarkably similar texts that point to a connection between British and American culture. Robertson characterises their novels as the 'Romantic moral romance', a unique kind of romance that acts as an experimental sub-genre of the novel. He argues that Inchbald and Hawthorne are representative of a larger British/American cultural confluence.Read More