Affiliation:
1. State University of New York , Plattsburgh, USA
Abstract
Abstract
The chapter explores how Hawthorne’s novel of social reform, The Blithedale Romance (1852), addresses the dilemma at the heart of political liberalism—how a stable and just society is possible given the divergent worldviews individuals will inevitably hold—by examining the dynamics of friendship. It places Hawthorne’s novel in conversation with Aristotle, Edmund Burke, and Ralph Waldo Emerson to show how its protagonist, Miles Coverdale, turns to his “little platoon”—Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla—to make sense of the clashing perspectives rending the Blithedale community and the forms of belonging and connection that undergird broader political life. In doing so, Hawthorne—like Douglass and Stowe—emphasizes the importance of individuality and imagination for navigating the relationship between self and other, mind and world.
Publisher
Oxford University PressOxford
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