Preface.

This blog, purportedly written by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s romantic hero from The House of the Seven Gables, is an experiment in “parafiction.” Fiction Writers Review coined the term, which they define as using social media to “imagin[e] one’s way into a character—so far in that the writer assumes the character’s identity—to create new narratives about the characters.”

Much in the way that Hawthorne’s romance was an “attempt to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us” (ix), this blog aims to observe, with humor, the divers and tickling parallels between 1850 and 2011. With the entwined mission to present this blog, for a grade, in the course of achieving for one author, a Master’s degree, we will additionally be treating our Reader with that healthy and wholesome food which the academy terms literary and cultural analysis. The Author would be glad, therefore, if this blog may be read as a commentary on media culture, then and now, not less than a statement regarding personages and themes to be found in the works of our American literary canon.