My Kinsman, Major Molineux | Literary Precedents
Hawthorne's contemporaries saw in his tale of Robin Molineux a continuation of a number of stories relating the break between the American colonies and England. From a literary perspective, however, the story belongs to the tradition of the Tale of Initiation, of which numerous examples exist. Distant eighteenth-century predecessors include the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett, e.g., Roderick Random (1748) and Humphry Clinker (1771), which describe the misadventures of young men thrust into the adult world and left to fend for themselves. Twentieth-century critics have...
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