The Law of Seduction

This chapter recounts how Lydia Maria Child had taken Amelia Norman to her home to live with her as an intimate of her family after she won the trial. It notes how Lydia kept track of Amelia during the months that she lived with her in the spring of 1844, getting to know her better than she had been able to when Amelia was a prisoner at the Tombs. It also mentions Lydia's belief that Amelia's strong deep feelings were what drove her to the verge of madness. The chapter refers to Maria Lowell, wife of poet and diplomat James Russell Lowell, to whom Lydia recommended Norman for a job as a personal maid. It highlights Lydia's publication of “Letter from New York No. V” while Amelia was living with her, which was a jeremiad against the failure of the law to protect women and the men who made the law.

Prologue

This prologue sets the scene by talking in detail about one early flashpoint in the history of the interview and literature: the so-called ‘Hawthorne–Lowell scandal’. This 1886 dispute followed the publication of a newspaper interview between Julian Hawthorne (son of Nathaniel) and James Russell Lowell. Attending to the terms of this debate and to the interview form itself offers important insights into individual, national, and transatlantic responses to the changing nature of public debate and authorship, in part the result of new journalism, in an increasingly saturated and mediated public sphere. A crisis in the early history of the interview, the Hawthorne–Lowell affair demonstrates the degree to which the cultural embedding of the practice and form was closely associated with the experience of modernity itself.

Thoreau és az organikus kritika egy sajtóvita tükrében

A tanulmány Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) filozófiáját tárgyalja a Thoreau-szakirodalomba általunk bevezetni kívánt organikus kritika mentén. A tanulmány apropója egy 2015 őszén lezajlott sajtóvita, amelyet Kathryn Schulz robbantott ki a New Yorkerben megjelent Pond Scum. Why do we love Henry David Thoreau? c. cikkével. A cikk a hagyományos, negatív előjelű Thoreau-kritikát (amelyet James Russell Lowell és Robert Louis Stevenson neve fémjelez) folytatja, és hipokritának, mizantrópnak és gondolatilag károsnak állítja be az amerikai filozófust. Schulz cikkére számtalan válasz érkezett, a tanulmány ezeket tipizálja, majd összeveti a meglátásokat. Véleményünk szerint, ha az organikus kritika módszerével olvassuk, a thoreau-i gondolkodás tisztába tehető és kivédhetőek a klasszikus vádak. A tanulmány tézise, hogy Thoreau nem normatív jellegű filozófiát folytat, hanem az emberi élet végtelen dinamizmusára emlékezteti elsősorban saját magát, másodsorban fele-barátait.