A much-needed and outstanding study of Hawthorne’s preoccupation with Nature, a neglected theme in Hawthorne studies. Steven Petersheim offers a comprehensive view of Hawthorne’s relationship to nature in his journals, correspondence, short fiction, travel sketches, and novels. With great verve, Petersheim describes Hawthorne’s ongoing fascination with nature from his college days onwards through his travels to Europe and shows unwitting similarities but ofttimes ruptures with his Transcendentalist neighbors in Concord in their assessment of nature. An indispensable resource for scholars and students of nineteenth-century American literature and environmental studies.

Monika Elbert, Prof. of English, Montclair State University

Rethinking Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nature is a very welcome and long-needed contribution to ecocriticism and nineteenth-century American literary studies, unsettling the common (mis)conception of Hawthorne as the isolated writer and revealing him instead as a man deeply engaged with the natural world around him. In this first book-length ecocritical study of Hawthorne’s work, Petersheim brings insightful and wide-ranging analyses to the breadth of Hawthorne’s career, including not just the well-known stories and popular romances, but also his nonfiction writings, including his personal notebooks, and the unfinished late romances. Petersheim does an excellent job situating Hawthorne’s writing in its historical contexts, all the while bringing a fresh theoretical eye to many of these much studied works.

Tom J. Hillard, Boise State University