Generally speaking, the books of Harold Bloom that are worth reading are those that limit their focus to one individual: Shakespeare, Wallace Stevens, Shelley, Yeats (the latter two being pre-ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE works). The reason for this is because Bloom is a gargantuan intellect -- smarter and better-read than probably any five people you might happen to know put together -- and these books are chock full of provocative insights, regardless of the dubious theoretical scaffolding upon which they might be erected. In other words, though the foundations of most of Bloom's books written after AOI are infirm, Bloom is, at the end of the day, a compelling and highly enthusiastic critic, and also frequently aphoristic enough to keep you reading even after you begin to suspect that his more ludicrous and indefensible ex cathedra prounouncments, of which there are many thousands scattered throughout his oeuvre, are on the verge of causing you to tear out clumps of your hair.

When it comes, on the other hand, to Bloom's more purely theoretical works (THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE, AGON, etc.), all I can say is CAVEAT EMPTOR! In these works, and others like them, Bloom's perspective is neither that of a writer nor that of his constantly vaunted "common reader." Rather, Bloom's outlook here is that of a thoroughgoing academic, who as much as he has tended to decry the decline of academia in recent years owing to the combined effects of sundry "Schools of Resentment" (multiculturalists, neo-Marxists, Afro-Centrists, etc.) -- that is, those who value theory over literature -- in AOI Bloom can be seen as something of the Pope, High-Priest and Grand Poobah of this nauseating trend which seems, alas, destined to remain with us forever.

To my way of thinking, the reductio ad absurdum of Bloom's "revisionary ratios" (the multi-tiered, quasi-Oedipal struggle whereby "strong" poets, by reprocessing the work of other poets, supposedly become original) is that if the act of creation is indeed so paradigmatic that it can be diagrammed, then one day computers should be able to crank out verse as profound, witty and memorable as Shakespeare, Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot, et al. Oh, but excuse me: T.S. Eliot, according to Bloom, isn't a particularly strong poet -- though if anyone can understand Bloom's reason for regarding him as such, then perhaps you will be able to decipher the Riddle of the Sphinx, too. Or, to quote the words of Lord Byron, "And he who understands him would be able/To add a story to the Tower of Babel."

Anyway, in interviews I've read given by Bloom, at least in recent years, he seems like a decent enough fellow. But this book, the first of a series of common sense-deprived, balderdash-laden tracts, is pure intellectual B.S. If this is the sort of thing that turns you on, then what else can I say except that there is probably no ground in the universe where you and I will ever be able to meet.

I have previously described myself in a review as the most spaced-out poet on the planet, without describing the awful legal context in which such a view of myself is absolutely necessary. This book makes the context clear, but a general reader still might not understand how concrete this difficulty is because THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE is overtly a book about poetry, and hardly at all about exercising judgment. The page of the book where I left it open the longest, and where the book subsequently opened most easily, and which I read most often in the five weeks in which I was interested in this book, was page 58, which describes a poet who "experiences anxiety necessarily towards any danger that might end him as a poet." Without dwelling on the personalities of the people involved, it seems to me that the anxiety which this book is about is clearest in the case of the presidential election of 2000, in which the ability of the Florida Supreme Court to act as the ultimate judges of that opportunity to count ballots was subject to the power of the United States Supreme Court to judge the election in some way which would produce a result which would be opposite to what a majority of the Florida Supreme Court desired. (...)and poets can be much more open about what they are doing than judges, so it isn't too surprising that this book is about poets.

Freud and Nietzsche form a nice frame of reference for what is happening in this book. I kept looking for mentions of Rilke, which wasn't fruitful until page 99, the first page on "Daemonization or The Counter-Sublime." There it says, "History, to Rilke, was the index of men born too soon, but as a strong poet Rilke would not let himself know that art is the index of men born too late. . . . the dialectic between art and art, or what Rank was to call the artist's struggle against art . . . governed even Rilke, who outlasted most of his blocking agents, for in him the revisionary ratio of daemonization was stronger than in any other poet of our century." There is a page just before page 99 which quotes Emerson on the highest truth about all things going well, "long intervals of time, years, centuries, are of no account." (p. 98). Emerson shows up again on page 138, with the idea, "Who seem to die live," to precede the final section of the book, "Apophrates or The Return of the Dead." This part doesn't relate well to law, particularly for a system which keeps thinking that a judgment like the death penalty might be considered final at some point.

It would be unfair to suggest that anyone who disagrees with Bloom is simply suffering from the escapist, repressive anxiety of which he claims to be a theorist. Likewise, it would be a circular argument to say that anyone who finds Bloom's stance self-defeating is merely an anxious ephebe trying to justify their own mediocrity, to dissemble their own belatedness, to obscure the deeper issues of poetic originality.

Or would it?

I've been ridiculed for saying this, but *The Anxiety of Influence* is a very harsh, very difficult little book. And yes, most writers *do* tend to shrug it off with defensive laughter and glib overconfidence. "Bloom's theories don't apply to me, after all. *I* don't feel the anxiety of which he speaks. I'm as young as Adam in the literary Garden of Eden, and my work is as important and worthwhile as I wish it to be." Thus tolls the death-knell of the M.F.A. student in Creative Writing.

Bloom's vision of the Canon has nothing to do with a required list of books, with the "carrion-eaters" of Tradition, paying uncritical knee-tribute to precedents and precursors. Bloom is simply reminding us that literature is not created in a vacuum of Edenic self-deception (the bland, cheeky optimism of the writing workshop), but rather in the poetomachia of the solitary apprentice testing himself against the creations of the past and present, a gladiatorial dialogue with the collective personae of Anteriority. In other words, the greatest literature is in competition with *itself*, an internalized version of the Canon that each strong poet carries within. The competition is both loving and malicious, and the "precursor" is always a composite of texts and artists, including contemporary authors fighting for imaginative and thematic territory, spurring each other on to higher achievements while stampeding the fallen.

For polemical purposes, Bloom simplifies the "composite precursor" in his reading of the English Romantics, testing themselves against the canonical strangeness of one John Milton. By casting the Miltonic Satan as the modern poet *in extremis*, Bloom creates a critical mythology as compelling as it is melodramatic, working through the byzantine evasions and torque-laden inversions the ephebe undertakes to carve out an imaginative space for himself. The "revisionary ratios" are derived from the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, conceptualizing poetic creation as a heroic self-purgation and regeneration, achieving originality with an apparent loss of power, then returning to the fold for fresh melee and assimilative combat. Bloom's conscious objective is TO MAKE THE POET'S JOB MORE DIFFICULT, the smash complacency where it lives, in the Eliotic idealizations of "Tradition and the Individual Talent", which argues (catastrophically, in Bloom's view) that poetry is the benign and empyreal handing-down of the Muse's wedding-band from precursor to ephebe. But as Bloom persuasively argues, Eliot's stuffy and pretentious election of Dante as his true poetic father desperately obscures his true debts to Tennyson and Whitman, and his poetry may be weaker as a result. The casualties of Eliot's "poetic pacifism" lie forgotten in the charnel-house of unknown soldiers who've mistaken academic careerism for the deeper mysteries of canonical anguish, who've taken the low road of insularity against the combative "wakening of the dead."

To suggest that this sort of gladiatorial perspectivizing is "self-defeating" is rather like calling Nietzsche a "nihilist" because he chose to philosophize with a hammer -- that is, dedicated himself to scraping away all the evasions, the happy-go-lucky subterfuge -- to provide a more truthful genealogy of art and creativity and, more importantly, an Ethics on precisely what is required of writers (born this late in history) pretending to canonical strength. *TAoI* is as Nietzschean a text as you will find, a polemical kick in the stomach, brutal in its necessities, staring deep into the horizon of literature and conceptualizing the intra-poetic psychic warfare of poets WHO WILL NOT DIE. It is a nail-bomb thrown into the seminar-room of creative writing workshops, exploding the glib complacency of young writers who've forgotten that Time is unforgiving in its choice of literary survivors.

To put it another way, Bloom never says that originality doesn't exist, only that our idealized, Eliotic perceptions of originality are immature and self-defeating, an excuse not only to *be* mediocre (as young as Adam at the dawn of Creation), but to revel in and celebrate that mediocrity. That said, those who are coddled by Academe will probably find Bloom's book vulgar, incomprehensible, melodramatic, even paranoid in its implications. While others, stoically self-critical, will find themselves reading a completely different book, and a glorious one at that.

As the previous reviewer suggested, there may be room enough in the academic industry for a communal fellowship of writers and teachers, but there is an important qualitative difference between the respectable productions of, say, a Mark Van Doren, and the monstrous achievements of canonical prowess Bloom examines here. Mediocrity needs to justify itself, to make excuses for its smug complacency, but just as 99.9% of our generation's literature is "written in water," so the canonical survivors of the future will be forced to take even more extreme measures to be remembered, to stand in the square where martyrs are made. Bloom's book, in essence, attempts to dramatize and account for these "extreme measures."

*The Anxiety of Influence*, for all its conceptual flummery and Rube Goldberg convolutions, stands today as a brilliant thought-experiment on the lengths genius will go to stamp itself in bronze, to carry on and flourish in a universe of Death (or its literary equivalent, Compromise). Even if you find his main argument pedantic and repulsive, Bloom provides dozens of pyrotechnic micro-arguments in each chapter, not to mention some brilliant and provocative readings of classic poetry. Bloom is a great talker and showman, and those who dismiss his theories as frivolous poppycock may still be charmed by his brash, Hazlittean personality. The important thing is to take the time to understand where Bloom is coming from, and not to project one's own anxieties onto this difficult and rewarding text.

This is a deeply disappointing collection that I am not sure I would even recommend to the serious student of the Iliad. And one can be forgiven for being disappointed, after all Harold Bloom is the editor. When I was a University student in the seventies, Bloom was revered, in particular by students of the Romantic poets. Bloom had written what was (and still is) a vital text on Shelley (Shelley's Mythmaking") and had followed that up with a magnificent survey of the Romantics in, "The Visionary Company". When my interests turned to Blake, Bloom was there with Blake's Apocalypse".

And so, when later in life I developed a keen interest in the Iliad, I was overjoyed to see that Bloom had pulled together a collection of essays to help me understand this complicated yet surprisingly readable poem.

WRONG! Of all the thousands of commentaries on the Iliad, Bloom somehow managed, with a notable exception or two, to pull together some of the most arcane, obtuse writings I can imagine. Even the specialists will be challenged by some of the subject matter here. And the presentation? Well, for the most part the prose is turgid, representing the worst of academic stylism. The exception is the lucid and beautifully written excerpt from E.R. Dodds', "The Greeks and the Irrational." But this is to be expected, as this is justly one of the most famous and important books ever written on the subject of ancient Geek culture. I found the rest of the essays to be overly technical and narrow in scope and compass. If you have read Victor Davis Hanson's "Who Killed Homer", you will find most of the sins he enumerates present in this collection.

But the MOST disappointing part of this entire collection is the introduction itself. In which we see Bloom at his worst - preachy, tendentious, over weaning. He takes the opportunity to take a few pot shots at the authors represented in the collection and to advance his own, in my view eccentric, conception of the poem. You know you are in for a rough ride when from the very outset we are treated to a comparison of the Iliad with the Hebrew Bible - a comparison in which the Iliad does not come off on top. At the end of the introduction, we read that while Homer himself is the "best of the poets", unfortunately, he lacks a "quality of trust in the transcendent memory of a covenant fulfilled, a lack of the sublime hope that moves the Hebrew poet Deborah." Geez, I'm sorry but, umm, who cares? This is a bit like complaining that apples don't have the citrus acidity of oranges.

Clearly, Bloom had an axe to grind - and grind it he did. It is as though he was determined to make the case for the Bible's superiority to the Iliad. As an introduction to a collection of essays, Bloom's is, in a word, "lacking"!

So where does that leave the interested reader. Well, it's not easy. I can think of no good general introduction that is separately published. That said, Bernard Knox wrote an introduction to Robert Fagles' translation of the Iliad that is almost transcendent. It puts to poem in context, describes the central action and delves into the poem's main cultural foundations. I would recommend that a first time reader of the Iliad equip him or herself first with this and second with Stanley's Lombardo's brilliant modern translation - oh, and stay away from this collection.

Barron's book notes for the Iliad are, believe it or not, better than Cliff's. The chapter summaries are longer and more detailed, but not too long. And, it helps one to understand the complexities of Homer.

Iliad is harder to read than Odyssey, but it is as rich as this one, and the person who attents, without contemporary prejudices, to the details of this work, to this person will be revealed one of the few, really few jewels that humanity wrote in its adventure. May you admire the star calle Homer.

Be cautious ... this edited version is a research and study guide ... it is not the full text of the book!

Can it be said that there's no place like home in all instances? This group of post-war youth prove this enticing theory wrong. Home is where the comfort lies, not the heart.

Jake, Brett, Bill, Robert, and Mike form a group of friends traveling wherever their consience leads them. Growing restless when they keep themselves in one situation for too long, this mess of human regret lives for the moment. They travel to the week long Fiesta in Pamplona, where they find nights of drinking and days of somber realizations, uniquely tied hand in hand with bullfighting.

As is true with most Hemingway novels, a man and woman's relationship with one another is used as a mode of depicting his views on life. Lady Ashley (Brett, disguising herself with a title as she does with short hair and hats and various other men's traits) stars as the diva without a cause. She wanders the streets of Paris in search of a good night in bed, which is all the war has left her with. As was done to the rest of war-participating America, Brett was stripped of compassion, of desire for love, and was left with a hollow lust. This lust was never to be filled but was continually in search of completement. This is what drew Brett to Pamplona with Mike, her haughty, yet understandably grounded, fiance.

Perfectly depicting the result of Brett's search for completion, Robert Cohn follows Brett to the Fiesta and likewise follows her every move. He is a former lover whwhich cannot seem to tear himself from the idea that she was once his. By his continual snooty comments, and the fact that Brett could find pleasure in him and not Jack (sexually hindered by a war wound) every word that comes from his mouth is the subject of Jack's narrative scorn.

Easily understood is Jack's disattachment from the world which took away his "manliness," especially when this is that which would attract the one thing in life that he values, Brett. Jack's love for Brett is obbsessive and ultimatley dooming when he sacrifices his remaining link to disillusionment, bulllfighting, which is his last escape from the chaos trailing the war. In an effort to please Brett, he gives access to an able-bodied matador, the object of her lust. After losing the trust of a community held tight with respect by Jake, he is left with the same Brett, just a little more contented than she was five minutes ago.

In my careful opinion, Hemingway has reconstructs a world ignored by many, but remembered and endured to this day. In a time of confusion and distrust in the reality of human emotion, this group typifies the actions of self-indulgence and disparity which characterize this generation. Instead of merely a drunken party with some good fights, some bullfighting, and plenty of sex, the novel depicts with pity the lost generation and all their woes.

For all those opposing the seemingly endless stream of war literature, it's fair to say "Give it up, already!" With unforgetable stories like these, how can we complain about a generation willing to share their tales of dedication to one true thing, in a time of great confusion. Their sacrifices will live forever in us and our decisions. Respect this and you can understand any Hemingway novel that is thrown at you.

This is a wonderful edition of a great work. Hemingway's first novel, "The Sun Also Rises" is a beautiful, elegiac portrait of restless, unsatisfied expatriots wandering through Europe during the 1920s. In many respects, although the style and narrative differ, this is a companion piece to Fitzgerald's "Gatsby"--beneath the seemingly carefree exterior of Hemingway's characters, beneath the drinking and carousing and aimless wandering, the mood is melancholy and empty. What makes this particular edition so valuable--to the scholar as well as the average reader--is the shrewd, readable appendices. This includes criticism, a biographical vignette, and other useful supporting materials.

Wonderful prose, beautifully observed character study, as WG slips into the skin of an extremely priggish and snobbish early twenties aristocrat as he comes of age and begins to understand a little more of the virtues of the ordinary people around him. Sea journeys of that era were long, tedious, largely uneventful and extremely uncomfortable. All 3 books in the trilogy carry this perfectly: the maritime atmosphere is conveyed as perfectly as the arrogant character of the narrator. However, the tedium of the journey also comes across in the virtually non-existent plot which makes the books drag on somewhat. It is probably, though, as brilliant description of the English class system at the start of the 19th century as you will read. I believe that the books in Trilogies should be able to stand alone, if they are to be sold separately, & on that basis, this trilogy definitely fails. I'm glad I read it as a single 750 page tome.

I have not had the opportunity to read the other parts in this trilogy, but for me this novel hangs together exceptionally well as an individual story. In brief, it is written as the journal of Edmund Talbot, composed for his godfather and patron, an English lord, during a journey from England to Australia sometime during the early 19th century. In particular, it deals with the events before, and the investigation subsequent to, the death of a parson who is also on board.

Because of the setting, characters of diverse backgrounds are thrown into closer contact than they might otherwise have had. This means that notions of class and how it impacts upon individuals play an important part in the novel. Questions of faith and the effect that it has upon actions are also crucial. Ultimately this is a very human story (much as is Golding's most famous book 'Lord Of The Flies') as it deals with the way that people react when put into extreme (and not so extreme) circumstances.

This is certainly a book worth reading on its own terms. However, it has also whet my appetite to find and read the other two books, 'Close Quarters' and "Fire Down Below'.

... since it leads you to believe that its subject matter is interesting.

After ordering this book and wading through its first few chapters, I had one overwhelming thought:

Thank you, Amazon.com, for your marvelous return policy.

Bloom is one of our better critics in terms of readability, but still... Unless you have a great appetite for arid erudition, just stick to reading the poetry itself. This book has more to do with some pet theory of Bloom's than with Stevens' poetry, or our climate--both of which could have been fascinating subjects for a book.

Bloom has written this book after an obviously long devotion to reading Stevens and to developing his critical methods, in one of its modes, to a fine precision. The reader of this book benefits most by a slow absorbtion of the varied terminology that Bloom had accumulated previous to this work and the additions then newly made to it. The approach to Stevens' poetry is immediate in its variance from most previous criticism and especially passive reading, or "weak misreading" as B. would call it. To follow him closely is to slough the innocence of idealizing all poetry as committed to presenting its own meaning. Unwitting believers of the like, deterred by Bloom's criticism for appearing so staunchly definitive (though an immediate antidote to a belief in the floppiness of poetry), havn't realized that beyond his belief (on particularly fine display) in the strong potential of formalizing tropes and decoding of intertextualities, is the existance in poetry of its reader's 'becoming' the text that is read, and to do it inventively, eccentrically, and considerately is essentially to further poetry itself.

We studied 'Lord of the Flies' for GCSE English and we think that this book has many hidden meaninigs.For example, we think that light, safety and hope of being rescued is represented by the beach, and that jungle represents the hidden darkness in human nature. We feel that the most important factor of the book is the conch as it represents democracy.When the conch smashed in chapter 11 it symbloises the end of democracy. The only bad point of the book is that Golding is to descriptive.

As the subject line states, this book is not for the untrained reader. There are countless numbers of biblical allusions throughout this story, but the subtleties could escape those reading for pure enjoyment. We are reading this novel in my tenth grade English class, and I have enjoyed delving farther into this somewhat twisted novel

This is an amazingly descriptive book. It shows that any one, even children, the most innocent can show their evil side when put in the right situation. Golding has used a snake to represent the evilness that occurs as the situation gets more and more desperate, and all civilisation breaks down. The way he has portrayed different aspects in the boys characters is very effective, and I could not fault this book.

Golding has a way with words; there is no denying it. At his best, he can really deliver a hard blow to the mind.

He is not at his best here.

There are some lovely snips--Cry! Cry! What shall I cry?--but they are buried in a story that manages to be both pretentious and pedestrian. The novelist, who may-or-may-not be Golding-esque (I don't know the man and am not reading to guess whether or not this is autobiographical), is a stereotype of a drunken writer dithering around Europe and having a nervous breakdown. There's nothing either sympathetic or interesting about him. His surrounding circle is equally vacuous, and the plot, regarding a biographer chasing him around to get a story is... well, dreary. It's not a complex story and I understand the things Golding means to say, but all in all, he does not say them very well.

A pity--the words really are quite nice.

This book whiled away a couple of days of a very rainy holiday in France. Normally I admire Golding more than I like him, but I greatly enjoyed this book although it's one of his lesser efforts. The hard-drinking, egotistical, talented and successful narrator (a novelist -- I have no idea whether there is any element of Golding himself in the character) is someone I found oddly sympathetic from a safe distance. Other characters in the book had every justification for taking another view of him -- other characters except one, that is, the one being his unspeakable would-be Sancho Panza Rick L. Tucker. Really Golding, like H. G. Wells, had just about every gift a novelist can have, even when he was only exercising it at half-power.

The other thing this book did for me was to introduce me to what has become one of my very favourite wines. If that aspect interests you, but not to the extent of actually reading the book, exercise your arrowy mind on the title I have given this little review.

I picked up this book (audio version) on a whim. I don't know much about W. Golding except that I had read Lord of the Flies 20 years ago in school. Each of the main characters in this book is so very detestable that you simply wish for terrible things to happen to all of them. Fortunately, Golding does not disappoint in this respect. If you a writer who hates writers you'll probably love this book.

One other comment...it may have one of the best last lines of a book ever.

When asked to read this book my first reaction was, it looks so old, it can't be good. As i started to read it i found it different from all other books that i had read. The book is slow at the start but it does become more interesting as the author discribes the way the world is seen by Neanderthal man; 'pictures' are memories and they believe logs are alive and have a mind of their own. William Golding's view point on their world is really an eye opener and this is a book that should be read by all. Inspiring!

This amazingly inventive piece of fiction takes on some of the same themes the author dealt with in Lord of the Flies, but in a surprising way. In this novel, the protagonists are the last of the Neandrathals who are in deadly conflict with emergent Homo Sapiens for their survival. Golding imagines these people as being essentially pre-verbal and it is a testiment to his skill as a writer that he can create effective characters without the tool of dialogue. Because of this convention, and the need to keep the story from the Neandrathal's (not quite human) point of view, it takes some time for the reader to achieve an understanding of what is happening and why. It becomes, nevertheless, a very moving story and one of the more inventive tales in serious modern literature.

As a companion piece from the current Homo Sapien point of view, one might want to read Beards novel about a hypothetical new jump in evolution, Darwin's Radio.

This book is complex but worth the effort if you have an IQ of more than room-temperature.

The comment by a previous reviewer is worth taking up:"And now I have an even bigger reason to dislike this book. I happen to hate reading screeds that trash the author's own ancestors. I'm sure homo sapiens were not perfect, but please show me a race or culture of people who are." Well, I'd agree, strongly. But it's not as simple as that: the Homo Sapiens Sapiens in The Inheritors are not shown as deliberately and strategically wiping out the last Homo Sapiens Neanderthalus. Rather, they are terrified of them. They think they are defending themselves against horrifying demons - why do they submit to the discipline of the whip to drag the canoe up the portage? Plainly they are half out of their minds with terror, which the Neanderthals cannot comprehend. Further, the Neanderthals, though gentle and innocent, are plainly inadequate. The process of their replacement by the Homo Sapiens Sapiens, or Cro-Magnards, is cruel but it is not morbid. The Neanderthals, it is clearly demonstrated, are at a dead-end (they are only a vestige of a tribe at the beginning of the story). The survival of the Neanderthal infant means some of their gentleness and innocence may survive into the new world. It is actually a relief to get into the Cro-Magnards' minds in the final chapter after the limitation of having to see everything from a Neanderthal point of view. The Cro-Magnards are at one point called "the people of the fall" - in religious terms they are the people of the "Fall" indeed - Postlapsarian Man. Unlike the Neanderthals, they do have knowledge of good and evil, and we see at the end even the rudiments of conscience - which is not to say the end of the Neanderthals is not utterly tragic.

Like all Golding's earlier works, this is the exploration of difficult moral dilemnas. There are lessons there but they are not easy.

Hawthorne uses a lot of symbolism and themes, most of which he over-uses. His sentences last for paragraphs, and his style is so sophisticated it gave me headaches to read it. If you want something to put you to sleep, this is it. Ow. I personally disliked the book and I would rather eat my gym socks than read it over again. Booorrring!!!!!!

The Scarlett Letter is a wonderfully written novel, that encompasses the Puritan life in the early settlement of New England. The main characters in the book are Hester Prynne, Rev. Dimmsdale, Pearl, and the haughty physician Roger. The scandal in the novel is adultery. A sin that takes a hold of all the characters in one way or another. Love and truth are the few things the characters can trust. Isolation is also a great part of the novel and with each turning of a page Hester's strength empowers the reader to hold that tear let the heart remain strong...for ourselves and for Hester.

I am a junior in college. I had to read this book once before for a lit. class my junior year in high school. I admit it was a bit difficult to read the first time, but I understood and enjoyed it this time. I recommend looking into what was going on during the Romantic Period and gaining an understanding of what Romantic writers focused on. It will help you understand the story line. And if you get a chance, check out some other works by Hawthorne, like The Birthmark or Young Goodman Brown. That will help you understand Hawthorne's style of writing.