Our studies have recently shifted to people who are writing for the sake of evoking an American character in their work. Irving and others sought to capture the new nation through monsters and folksy tales, and those tales are now embedded in our national consciousness. The focus now shifts to those who continue that tradition while seeking to defy some of the optimism of the Enlightenment. These authors, such Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, reveled in the unknown, thereby implicitly arguing that there is something unreachable in nature, what might possibly be termed the 'noumenon' of Kantian transcendental idealism. This episode focuses on Hawthorne's work so that it might show the way this author manifests those goals in his short fiction.

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Dore, Gustave. Dudley Street, Seven Dials. Victorian Web, http://www.victorianweb.org/history/london/7dials.html. Accessed 20 Oct. 2020.