Other editions of book The Marble Faun

Hawthorne's classic "international novel" showcases the durability of life and art, chronicling the adventures of a group of American expatriates in Italy. Befriended by the handsome Donatello, who possesses all of the grace of a marble statue of a faun, the Americans find themselves swept up in events beyond their reason and expectations. Italy and Rome become characters in this witty and symbolic romance, drawing on art, literature, and the Fall from Grace as its themes. Hawthorne's last completed romance; he believed it to be his finest work. last novel, which he thought to be his best.

Though Nathaniel Hawthorne is best remembered as the author of the quintessential American parable The Scarlet Letter, some of the New England writer's work was much less formal and traditional than that novel. In fact, some critics regard The Marble Faun, rife with impressionistic and fantastical elements, as downright experimental by comparison. It's a fascinating read that will please fans of Lovecraft and other uncanny horror.

The Marble Faun; or, The Romance of Monte Beni, novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1860. It is one of the works Hawthorne called romances—“unrealistic” stories in exotic settings. The novel’s central metaphor is a statue of a faun by Praxiteles that Hawthorne had seen in Rome. In the faun’s fusing of animal and human characteristics, Hawthorne found an allegory of the fall of man from amoral innocence to the knowledge of good and evil, a theme that often had been assumed in his earlier works but that here received direct and philosophic treatment

The fragility-and the durability-of human life and art dominate this story of American expatriates in Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. Befriended by Donatello, a young Italian with the classical grace of the “Marble Faun,” Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon find their pursuit of art taking a sinister turn as Miriam’s unhappy past precipitates the present into tragedy. Hawthorne’s ‘International Novel’ dramatizes the confrontation of the Old World and the New and the uncertain relationship between the ‘authentic’ and the ‘fake’ in life as in art. The author’s evocative descriptions of classic sites made The Marble Faun a favourite guidebook to Rome for Victorian tourists, but this richly ambiguous symbolic romance is also the story of a murder, and a parable of the Fall of Man. As the characters find their civilized existence disrupted by the awful consequences of impulse, Hawthorne leads his readers to question the value of Art and Culture and addresses the great evolutionary debate which was beginning to shake Victorian society.

The Marble Faun: Or, The Romance of Monte Beni, also known by the British title Transformation, was the last of the four major romances by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and was published in 1860. The Marble Faun, written on the eve of the American Civil War, is set in a fantastical Italy. The romance mixes elements of a fable, pastoral, gothic novel, and travel guide.

Though Nathaniel Hawthorne is best remembered as the author of the quintessential American parable The Scarlet Letter, some of the New England writer's work was much less formal and traditional than that novel. In fact, some critics regard The Marble Faun, rife with impressionistic and fantastical elements, as downright experimental by comparison. It's a fascinating read that will please fans of Lovecraft and other uncanny horror.

The Marble Faun is Hawthorne's most unusual romance, and possibly one of the strangest major works of American fiction. Writing on the eve of the American Civil War, Hawthorne set his story in a fantastical Italy. The romance mixes elements of a fable, pastoral, gothic novel, and travel guide. The climax comes less than halfway through the story, and Hawthorne intentionally fails to answer many of the reader's questions about the characters and the plot.

The fragility-and the durability-of human life and art dominate this story of American expatriates in Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. Befriended by Donatello, a young Italian with the classical grace of the “Marble Faun,” Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon find their pursuit of art taking a sinister turn as Miriam’s unhappy past precipitates the present into tragedy. Hawthorne’s ‘International Novel’ dramatizes the confrontation of the Old World and the New and the uncertain relationship between the ‘authentic’ and the ‘fake’ in life as in art. The author’s evocative descriptions of classic sites made The Marble Faun a favourite guidebook to Rome for Victorian tourists, but this richly ambiguous symbolic romance is also the story of a murder, and a parable of the Fall of Man. As the characters find their civilized existence disrupted by the awful consequences of impulse, Hawthorne leads his readers to question the value of Art and Culture and addresses the great evolutionary debate which was beginning to shake Victorian society.