Different eras of literary criticism and biography always overlap and interact with one another, complicit in each other's confrontational positions or interpretations, but we can still detect important shifts in emphasis and method as we move forward chronologically from the nineteenth century into the twentieth century, with its focus on texts as aesthetic objects to be “de-coded” and meticulously analyzed in the New Criticism and its interest in psychological patterns and paradigms, the ambiguities implicit in Hawthorne's style, the mythic overtones and resonance of many of his plots, and the religious underpinnings of much of his vision. Until the turn of the twentieth century criticism tended to be impressionistic, spasmodic, and scattered. Critics interwove a writer's life with his or her art as if one easily explained and reflected the other and pursued various tangents, depending whatever seemed to arise as long as the general narrative followed the overall trajectory of the writer's life. From a contemporary perspective, such criticism looks blurred and diffuse, meandering and aimless as it veers from the life to the art in no rigorous or carefully constructed manner. Much of it is maddening for one trying to track down a critic's position or stance. Much of it proclaims the critic's point of view and ideological stance in no uncertain terms, doggedly and repetitiously, yet wading through Hawthorne criticism and biography in the last half of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century is by and large a thankless task, searching for nuggets of insight and perspective that are often difficult to locate.