Dec 29, 2009

My Kinsman, Major Molineux | Historical Context

The Romance and the Tale
Writing ‘‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’’ in the late 1820s or early 1830s, Hawthorne looked primarily to European writers for his models. For readers and writers of the nineteenth century, the forms of writing called ‘‘the novel’’ and ‘‘the romance’’ were distinct in style and in theme. Hawthorne found that most readers and critics favored the novel, but that the romance suited his own artistic temperament better.

Romance did not have the meaning it came to have in the late twentieth century: a story mainly...