"The Province of Piety is one of the most important studies in American literature of the present generation."—Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside "The most comprehensive and far reaching book on Hawthorne. Colacurcio’s treatment of the tales and Hawthorne’s intellectual biography, so vast and compelling, so rich in detail about the whole sweep of colonial and early republican thought, is ... Read morean account of most everything that matters in early American literary history. It is one of the monumental books of the postwar era of literary critical thought in American studies."—Eric Sundquist, University of California, Los Angeles "This is a major work—a richly textured discussion of Hawthorne’s crucial early development as writer, as moral thinker, and as historian. It is an extraordinary achievement in creative contextual scholarship."—Sacvan Bercovitch Show Less