Hawthorne's Romances

Book excerpt: First Published in 2000. Throughout the nineteenth century, the study of geometry remained at the core of educational curricula in the United States, strongly affecting how educated Americans construed their world. This book examines how each of Nathaniel Hawthorne's romances presents a different geometric figure that becomes representative of the work's themes and narrative designs. These geometric figures, when approached from the perspective of Victor Turner's symbolic anthropology, server as cultural mediators, combining geometric symbology with a unique narrative perspective to offer metaphors of personal and cultural boundaries, Freidman presents the literary text as the point of intersection among such disciplines as cultural anthropology, history, mathematics and American literature.