About the Author

Jana L. Argersinger (Editor)
JANA L. ARGERSINGER is a coeditor of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance and Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism and serves as president of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

Leland S. Person (Editor)
LELAND S. PERSON is a professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. His books include The Cambridge Introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Reviews

This engaging—sometimes even moving—collection produces a compelling, multidirectional dialogue about how readers might understand the substance of the provocatively cryptic relationship between Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Whatever their answers, the essays included here manage to convey the critical liveliness that each scholar brings to the incomplete dialogue between these two centrally important U.S. writers.
*Vanderbilt University*

This provocative book, as it examines the complex relationship between Hawthorne and Melville, yields a series of engrossing and deeply informed readings of their lives and their works. The contributors to this volume have obviously freed themselves from the tradition of a cautious and muted approach to the Hawthorne-Melville relationship and, by taking a new, boldly imaginative and speculative approach, have arrived at rich new understandings of the relationship, especially its sexual and political dynamics. The result is a major contribution to scholarship of the period.
*author of European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance*