Authorial Intention And Manipulation: A Rhetorical Narrative Analysis Of Hawthorne’s Short Stories

As we all know, Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of the prominent romantic writers in American literature. His short stories, with their wide range of themes and richness in meaning, reflect his extraordinary writing skills and his deep concerns about society, human nature, religion and so on. His two representative collections of short story TwiceTold Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse are not merely critical to his own writing profession, but also honored as valuable classics of world literature, which have achieved great popularity worldwide all the time.Previous studies on Hawthorne‘s short stories mainly involve some works and most of them focus on Hawthorne‘s profound themes and distinct artist features like images and ambiguity. With the rising of narratology in the 1960 s, a few scholars analyzed Hawthorne‘s short stories from the narrative perspective, but they primarily rely on classical narrative interpretations, while postclassical narrative theory are rarely used in the criticism of his short stories. On the basis of rhetorical narratology, this thesis aims to study authorial intention and manipulation in Hawthorne‘s short stories through three narrative manipulating methods he has adopted: narrative intervention, narrative embedding and various focalizations. Furthermore, this thesis also analyzes the stylistic manipulating techniques in Hawthorne‘s short stories. These auxiliary techniques include the intentional use of diction, figures of speech, certain punctuations and various discourse representations. As great supplementary to his narrative techniques, these stylistic techniques make the authorial intention and manipulation much more persuasive.Based on the above analysis, this paper comes to the conclusion that in Hawthorne‘s writings the authorial intentions wrapped in rich imagination and complex dreams can actually be tracked though they seem to be imbued with plenty of ambiguities. The narrative and stylistic techniques function as important clues to discover his intentions. Hawthorne‘s mastery of explicit and implicit manipulating methods contributes to the popularity of his short stories. Besides, Hawthorne manages to influence the reader through the use of various manipulating techniques, which contributes to the consensus on interpretations of his short stories between the reader and the implied author. Hawthorne‘s short stories to some degree function as a convenient vehicle for representing intentions to the reader and achieving manipulation over them, which is exactly the manifestation of rhetorical effects of literary works.