Hawthorne & Pynchon (Moral-Meta Historical Romance)

[Dave Williams]

So much has been written on Nat Hawthorne, but those interested in what he called his "Moral History" can not do better than Colacurcio, M.J. whose Introduction to the Penguin Selected Tales can be read Online. Hawthorne's earliest tales, some are not extant but were written about bu his sister after he passed, were influenced by Scott, but he quickly developed a unique American Romance. Pynchon has continued the tradition, writing mata-historical romance. 

sorry baout those terms again, but .....

Description
In this celebrated analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Michael J. Colacurcio presents a view of the author as America’s first significant intellectual historian. Colacurcio shows that Hawthorne’s fiction responds to a wide range of sermons, pamphlets, and religious tracts and debates—a variety of moral discourses at large in the world of provincial New England.
Informed by comprehensive historical research, the author shows that Hawthorne was steeped in New England historiography, particularly the sermon literature of the seventeenth century. But, as Colacurcio shows, Hawthorne did not merely borrow from the historical texts he deliberately studied; rather, he is best understood as having written history. In The Province of Piety, originally published in 1984 (Harvard University Press), Hawthorne is seen as a moral historian working with fictional narratives—a writer brilliantly involved in examining the moral and political effects of Puritanism in America and recreating the emotional and cultural contexts in which earlier Americans had lived. 

Michael J. Colacurcio is Professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles. 


Metahistorical Romance is a term describing postmodern historical fiction, defined by Amy J. Elias in Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction. Elias defines metahistorical romance as a form of historical fiction continuing the legacy of historical romance inaugurated by Sir Walter Scott but also having ties to contemporary postmodern historiography. In particular, in metahistorical romance, poststructuralist play invokes the "historical sublime" as defined in the work of Hayden White. Metahistorical romance--such as Thomas Pynchon's novel Mason & Dixon--attempts to recuperate the sublime untouchability of the past, to reach History and know it, but paradoxically in the context of the political. As with the Kantian sublime, the postmodern historical sublime is not the grasp of the sublime object itself but a kind of ironic awareness of the inaccessibility of the sublime object. There is a yearning that resembles the yearning for mystical knowledge
 at the core of the search for the historical sublime, and thus the concept ties contemporary historical fiction to a literary history (that of the historical novel), a type of historiography (postmodern, post-Annales historiography), and a spiritual questing. Elias argues that the postmodern imagination confronts the historical sublime rather than represses it; confronts it as repetition and deferral; seeks sublime History but simultaneously has lost faith in the storytelling needed to do so; and consequently has ties to, but reverses the dominant of, the traditional Anglo-American historical novel. The term "metahistorical romance" also builds upon work by Linda Hutcheon, whose term "historiographic metafiction" described the ironic stance of contemporary historical fiction.

Further reading
Elias, Amy J. Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990 rpt).

from wikipedia "Metahistorical_romance"