Supernatural embarrassment: The polemic between science and the supernatural in the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville

This dissertation contends that the treatment of supernatural themes in the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville is indicative of a trend in American philosophy toward a more guarded and phenomenological understanding of science in connection with new conceptualizations of truth as such. While the work will be concerned primarily with fabricating a panoramic picture of a continuum of American thought, extending into the first decades of the twentieth century, there will be some review of the social and political ramifications of scientific and intellectual developments as well. Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville occupy a pivotal position in what has come to be the traditional American canon, but their writings are to a certain extent more foreign to contemporary readers since the United States had not yet developed its modern character prior to the Civil War, the extension of capitalism, the publications of Darwin. They are rather too often read as timeless writers, especially with regard to what we might identify as a wider continuum of thought, the current of which was directed at the time largely by German critical and Romantic philosophy principally interpreted and represented to Anglophone audiences via Coleridge and Carlyle, supplemented by a lingering, affectionate interest in Hume and Berkeley. It is possible to discern the influence, direct or indirect, of these thinkers in the writings of the three authors named in my title, and to draw parallels between the tendencies or affinities of their philosophical thinking and those of authors whose works they could not know, such as is notably the case between Poe and Schopenhauer, Hawthorne and Kierkegaard, Melville and Nietzsche. Ultimately, all this thinking centers around certain religious questions which will be taken up by the Pragmatists, whose answers, many of which were anticipated or perhaps even directly affected by the writings of Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville, are still presently in circulation at present.