rdf-syntax-grammar
mods:
  schema location: http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
  title info:
    non sort: The
    title: documentary experience
    sub title: Hawthorne, Melville and the aesthetics of fancy
  name:
    name part: Turner, Alden Rolfe.
    role:
      role term: creator
  name:
    name part: Berthold, Dennis
    role:
      role term: degree supervisor.
  name:
    name part: Burt, Forrest D.
    role:
      role term: degree committee member.
  name:
    name part: Grabo, Norman S.
    role:
      role term: degree committee member.
  name:
    name part: McDermott, John J.
    role:
      role term: degree committee member.
  name:
    name part: Texas A & M University
    role:
      role term: degree granting institution.
  type of resource: text
  genre: bibliography
  genre: Academic theses
  genre: Criticism, interpretation, etc.
  origin info:
    place:
      place term: xx
    date issued: 1982
    issuance: monographic
  language:
    language term: eng
  physical description:
    form: print
    extent: viii, 316 leaves ; 29 cm
  abstract: The literary aesthetic conventions and innovations practiced in American fiction writers' recourse to historical documentary materials falls within a documentary tradition associated with the generic development of the novel as well as with American religious typology as an interpretive mode which survived a shift from sacred to secular texts. The popularity of early American novels "founded on fact" attests to this transition but also to a crisis of values which forced some writers to question the demands of a culture where promises of liberation were tied to the fulfillment of its historical texts of truth. Charles Brockden Brown and William Dunlap enlisted the aesthetic power of human fancy into the service of fact for fictions that ironically belie their own premises of substantive truth. Hawthorne supposed that his fiction, if not truth, might penetrate to a native American mythology in his fictional responses to the historical records of the Puritans' "persecuting spirit." In his "Prefaces," Puritan tales, and The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne's fear that his art is the product of his own inadequate imagination constrains him to attribute order and meaning to documentary sources while he transforms these same materials into fictions whose authenticity is actually dependent upon the free play of his own powers of fancy. In Melville's Benito Cereno, Israel Potter, and Billy Budd, the notion of documents as an historical ground for fiction as truth, or even as mythology, gives way to their treatment as unreliable yet powerful determinants of value and meaning--deceptive artifacts whose integrity is undercut by varying perspectives which exhaust historical forms of their truth as other than or different from his own documentary fiction. In their contemporary "metafiction," writers like John Barth and Robert Coover return to the literary sensibility of Hawthorne and Melville as a means for assaulting the thresholds and borders of their own inherited modes of expression…
  note: "Major subject: English."
  note: Typescript (photocopy).
  note: Vita.
  note: Ph. D. in Philosophy Texas A & M University 1982
  note: Includes bibliographical references (leaves 303-315).
  subject:
    name:
      name part: Hawthorne, Nathaniel
      name part: 1804-1864
    topic: Criticism and interpretation
  subject:
    name:
      name part: Melville, Herman
      name part: 1819-1891
    topic: Criticism and interpretation
  subject:
    topic: Nonfiction novel
    topic: History and criticism
  subject:
    topic: English
  identifier: http://proxy.library.tamu.edu/login
  identifier: https://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/DISSERTATIONS-515404
  related item:
    location:
      url: http://proxy.library.tamu.edu/login
  related item:
    location:
      url: https://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/DISSERTATIONS-515404
  record info:
    record content source: TXA
    record creation date: 840224
    record change date: 20220104090657.0
    record identifier: in00000505697
    language of cataloging:
      language term: eng