Colonization and Decolonization in The Blithedale Romance

In what follows I offer a reading of Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance under a postcolonial perspective. Before beginning, however, I should like to situate my reading critically, and sketch out a certain difficulty entailed by it, namely that of being caught between two apparently conflicting discourses: the established and familiar ones we designate as 'American Studies'; and the novel, trialling one that now accompanies the prodigious body of writing in English outside the Anglo-American sphere, and that comprises what has come to be called 'post-colonial study.'