Title: American Revolution under the Paradigm of National Character: A New Historical Research on Hawthorne’s Tales of Revolution

Abstract: By the 1830’s, the contemporary historians tried to make a grand political state rhetoric about American Revolution, representing the textuality of history. Different from the main-stream historical discourse to idealize and sanctify revolution, Hawthorne reconstructed the process of history from the perspective of national character. His tales unveiled the rebirth of old puritan character in revolution，wept over the loss of traditional grace after revolution and predicted the radical self-blindness of new race under the new order. Therefore, Hawthorne‘s short tales about American revolution not only engaged a dialogue with the contemporary dominant ideology but also supplemented people’s multi-dimensional cognitive of revolution and partook the construction of historical discourse, which represented the historicity of text.

Keywords: textuality of history, historicity of text, Nathaniel Hawthorne, American Revolution, New Historicism

Author: Jie Hu, Ph.D candidate, Foreign Studies College, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, Hunan, China