Special Issue of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, Hawthorne and Religion
The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review invites submissions for a special issue on Hawthorne and Religion, with guest editor Jonathan A. Cook. Over the course of his career, Hawthorne earned a reputation as the nation’s leading imaginative interpreter of New England Puritanism and its nineteenth-century cultural legacy, but the exact nature of his religious predilections remains open to debate. Was he a bona fide Christian? If he was, why didn’t he go to church? What credence did Hawthorne give to his ancestral Calvinism? What impact did his wife’s Unitarianism have on him? Did Hawthorne have a well-kept “secret” that influenced his depiction of repressed guilt? What did Hawthorne think of contemporary evangelical Protestantism, and of the nation’