Nothing would seem more obvious at first glance than the historical dimension of Hawthorne's literary art. His work of widest international reputation, The Scarlet Letter, is set squarely in the midst of the “Puritan” seventeenth century, and it shows all the signs of a determined inquiry into the moral circumstances of this relevant and specifiable past. The settings of his tales turn out to be quite various, but from among them a modest number set in colonial New England have attracted a disproportionate share of attention, as if in recognition that such “local history” were somehow his true metier. And compared to the universalism of contemporaries like Emerson and Thoreau, Hawthorne's bookish curiosity about historical particularities would certainly seem a distinguishing mark. So it might appear irresponsible to ignore the problems which arise when our literary present is constituted as an imitation of an historical past: This is now, as always, whenever anyone reads; but that was then. What if it was all different?

At the same time, however, few readers appear to relish the suggestion that what they read as “literature” may require an effort of historical reconstruction— and even of something like research. Perhaps we all begin by defining “the literary” so as to preclude that exact possibility: now for something on my own terms; or else, with a little more finesse, something complete in itself, something which invents and deploys its own world of fact and assumption. Granted, all acts of writing are past to the reader; and the further past of historical fiction may well compound the problem of possible human difference. But all acts of reading are present; nor does literature properly speaking occur until someone actually reads. So most readers are inclined to trust their own instincts: That was then, but this is now; and life is short.

Nor have the institutions of academic criticism always opposed these readerly assumptions. True, many Professors of Literature appear duty-bound to lecture their classes on something called background or context; and many of them are known to lament that teaching grows more difficult every year, as each new class seems less well informed about the history of the world where literature has been written and read.