To Be REAL or not to Be Real (Allegorical hands that turn the time)

[Dave Williams]

Did you look into _Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance_ by John Bryant? Itz on-line for free. Open it. Search for "Hawthorne's humor". And, your judgment that American Romance does not have the musical digressions is dead wrong. You can not judge a tradition, most of which you've not read, by a couple-few canonical texts.