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本文是一篇英语论文范文，笔者认为在《七个尖角阁的老宅》中，霍桑就刻画了许多具有如画美的人物。海波吉巴·潘钦、克里福德·潘钦、凡纳大叔都因为各自不同的原因，一路走来，经历了许多磨难，这些磨难在他们的外表和行为上都留下了如画的痕迹，令读者不免产生深深的同情与伤感。霍桑能够看到这些人类苦难，体现了他对人类生存困境的密切关注和强烈的人文关切。

Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Nathaniel Hawthorne and The House of the Seven Gables

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) is a representative writer of the American Renaissance, a period of vigorous development of American literature, and at the time, a large number of classic writers, including Emerson, Thoreau, Melville sprang up. Compared with his contemporaries, Hawthorne first gained literary fame in Europe and was later greatly appreciated and respected at home and abroad. As early as in 1837, when Hawthorne published his short story collection Twice Told Tales, American romantic poet Longfellow praised the artistic uniqueness and the reflection of social reality in his works and regarded Hawthorne as “a man of genius” (Crowely 55). Through the pages of Twice Told Tales, he mentioned, “we see the bright reflection of a spiritual star.” Edgar Allan Poe also praised Hawthorne’s artistry, considering him as a man of the truest genius. He added that “we only regret that the limits of our Magazine will not permit us to pay him that full tribute of commendation, which, under other circumstances, we should be eager to pay” (93). 

So what is Hawthrone’s artistry—to reconcile the two aspects of the Actual and the Imaginary (Kimbrough 277-78)? He rightly placed himself “between the Transcendentalists…and the great body of pen-and-ink men who address the intellect and sympathies of the multitude” (278). The Transcendentalists were concerned with the soul or what is spiritual, while the latter ignored what might be the divine or immortal aspect and stayed within the limits of the body’s head (intellect) and heart or what is reasonable. However, Hawthorne believed that both the soul and the body should not be neglected in favor of the other, so he attempted to combine these two aspects in his works. He further explained that, when creating their works, the artists must expand these two powers to “thought, imagination, and keenest sensibility” (279). And the two aspects of the spiritual and the actual must be acute, and at the same time, must remain in balance, so as to produce great art. 

1.2 Literature Review

Since Park Benjamin first commented on “The Gentle Boy” (one of the short stories in Twice Told Tales) in the New England Magazine in 1836, researches on Hawthorne have started to flourish and this research process has lasted for nearly two hundred years. Over all these years, critics have mainly studied Hawthorne’s works in terms of the following topics like Puritanism, structural form features, mythological archetypal structure, historical consciousness, the literary genre of romance, and Hawthorne’s own mental and psychological structure, etc.. The study of The House of the Seven Gables almost follows the same research line. 

1.2.1 Researches Abroad

In the 1920s and 1930s, a new research method called New Criticism came into vogue. Hawthorne’s works, with their perfect formal features and rich symbolic meanings, became a model of research in the eyes of New Critics. The New Criticism opposed the study combining of the writer’s life and social and cultural context, but a本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。