Biography
Dr Deanna Fernie is an independent scholar who has studied and taught on both sides of the Atlantic.
'Ambitious and original, Fernie’s work on Hawthorne throws into relief the crucial ways in which the development of sculpture and writing informed each other in early nineteenth-century America. As she explores Hawthorne’s use of sculpture to understand the representational limits of writing, she illuminates not only Hawthorne’s development as a writer, but also his understanding of America and its limits. Beautifully written, its deft use of literary theory and cultural history combines with a highly refined literary sensibility to produce a book that gives us a different Hawthorne than the one we may think we know.' Pamela Schirmeister, Yale University, USA
'Fernie's book offers ambitious, thickly researched, and valuable analyses of sculpture as both fact and analogue in Hawthorne's fiction. Her illuminating readings of Kenyon's unfinished bust of Donatello and the emerging figurehead in Drowne's Wooden Image, for example, provide provocative insights into Hawthorne's attitudes toward his own art, American artists, and the emerging country itself.' Rita K. Gollin, State University of New York, Geneseo, USA
'This well-written, multi-layered book, which deals both with the history and development of American art in relation to European traditions and with Hawthorne's appreciation of and quarrels with it, presents a clearly defined and careful argument as offered by Deanna Fernie... [she] has written a provocative and evocative book, rich with possibilities, clear in her careful arguments, and lavishly illustrated to prove her many points about sculpture and its uses in Hawthorne's fiction.' Cercles
