This infinite fraternity of feeling

The friendship between Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne was perhaps the most famous friendship involving two great American authors. This book proposes that Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance and Melville's Pierre, both published in 1852, are pivotal to understanding the two men's literary as well as personal relationship and should therefore be read as companion pieces. Both novels dramatize a crisis in the relationship of the two writers that occurred in the summer of 1851 when Melville - whose homoerotic preoccupations have finally become a major critical topic - made some advances toward Hawthorne that were immediately rebuffed. This study argues that both The Blithedale Romance and Pierre provide a significant comment on this crisis in the relationship, and taking into consideration recent directions in gender studies, it also proposes a new reading of the two novels as homoerotic texts. After departing from an exploration of Melville's and Hawthorne's personal relationship and the literary influence that the writers had on each other, author Monika Mueller analyzes gender, genre, and homoerotic crisis in the two works, focusing on the unfolding of their parallel struct