The marble faun
By: Nathaniel Hawthorne ; edited with an introduction and notes by Susan Manning.
Contributors: Manning, Susan.
Series: Oxford world's classics; Oxford world's classics (Oxford University Press)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Oxford; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 375
Subjects: Americans -- Italy -- Fiction; Women art students -- Fiction; Artists -- Fiction; Nobility -- Fiction; Murder -- Fiction; Rome (Italy) -- Fiction
Genres: Fiction.
Description: "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 his 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."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [xliii]-xlvi)