Michael J. Colacurcio's

The Province of Piety:
Moral History in Hawthorne's Early Tales

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 reveals that Hawthorne was steeped in New England historiography, particularly the sermon literature of the seventeenth century. But, as Colacurcio makes clear, 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, 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.

"This is a major work--a richly textured discussion of Hawthorne's crucial early development as writer, as moral thinker, and as historian. It is an extraordinary achievement in creative contextual scholarship." --Sacvan Bercovitch

"The most comprehensive and far-reaching book on Hawthorne. An account of most everything that matters in early American literary history, it is one of the monumental books of the postwar era of literary critical thought in American studies."--Eric Sundquist, University of California, Los Angeles

"The Province of Piety is one of the most important studies in American literature of the present generation."--Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside

"Criticism in the grand style--uncompromising, full of passion, even heroic."--Andrew Delbanco, Yale Review

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