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an amazing book
If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.Dark Romance: "The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville" by Harry Levin(Original Review, 1981-02-01)Harry Levin wrote a book called “The Power of Blackness” about Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, the classic trio of Dark Romance, and there is no doubt Blackness and Night haunt the human imagination and generate oneiric phantasms to boot. In the French cultural scene although surrealism was losing steam, it was still a powerful for...
It took me a while to trudge through this Manichean explanation, because, as it balances against three distinct but similarly isolated American minds, it has both the sensation of a literary lullaby and a heavy assertion. Best read when well read in the three authors as the works are examined and explored both stylistically but more-so with a plotcentric gaze (in example, I enjoyed reading about Poe and Hawthorne who I am more widely familiar with than reading of Melville). Although at times pri...
Although dated, published in 1958, this work provided the singular pleasure of being free of Deconstruction's double-speak and Continental theories, ideologies, and psycho-babbling obscurities. While, I would have wanted more discussion on Moby- Dick, I am, nevertheless, content with the critical appreciations of Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville offered here.
For literary criticism, not bad. The section on Poe is particularly fascinating. Fairly quick read, as well.
Enlightening essays on Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville. Perhaps analyses that were ahead of their time - interested in the racial, homoerotic, and liberal viewpoints of these authors, while also showcasing their darker sides. Levin contextualizes the authors' stories and novels in the American literary scene too, before and after them, by touching on Henry James and Ernest Hemingway, Walt Whitman and Washington Irving. Learning!
"A searching reinterpretation of the classic American masters of fiction -- maintaining that the characteristic mode of American writing is not the realistic novel, but the imaginative, symbolic romance." --back cover quote from NY Post.