Download or read book The Productive Tension of Hawthorne's Art written by Claudia Durst Johnson and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 1981 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In both his short fiction and major works, Nathaniel Hawthorne, like many romantics, is torn between the eighteenth-century view of an orderly, balanced, static art and universe, on the one hand, and the nineteenth-century conception of a changeful, various art on the other. Hawthorne based his social and psychological values on an organic view of the world, but the world of his art tended to be mechanistic. Johnson argues that Hawthorne found in theology the myths which became vehicles for his exploration of his art.