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NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: A STUDY OF THE SHORT FICTION by Nancy Bunge. Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. xi + 167 pages. $23.95.
The dust-jacket blurb promises far more than this book delivers--"Nancy Bunge investigates the whole of Hawthorne's short fiction canon, including a number of the less celebrated stories." Bunge's prefatory statement that she focused on 31 of Hawthorne's tales corrects the publisher's hype. Her wish that she could have written about Hawthorne's other 66 tales and sketches betrays a frustration that everyone who must conform to an existing series format must feel.
Within the harness of the format, Bunge lacked the space and freedom that Lea Newman enjoyed in A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Bunge's purpose differs essentially from Newman's in her virtual elimination of what scholars and critics have written about the tales and her concentration, instead, on providing a close reading of most of Hawthorne's major pieces of short fiction and a few of his lesser-known ones.
Her study, like others in the series, breaks down into three parts: Part 1 offers her reading of 31 tales; Part...