Nathaniel Hawthorne called his long narratives “romances” to claim their difference from the novels of his day. He appealed to a familiar and conventional distinction in order to launch a radical innovation. Romance in European culture, after its medieval dominance, had been killed by Cervantes in Don Quixote (1605) and its revival, in quite different form, two centuries later gave a name to the Romantics. In Britain, Walter Scott's historical romance in prose, beginning with Waverley (1814), offered a new freedom of action-packed storytelling, while the romanticism of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the poems of Lyrical Ballads (1798) opened a path into the human mind. Hawthorne adopted the term used for the externally oriented works of Scott and his American counterpart James Fenimore Cooper, but he sought inwardness, the “truth of the human heart”.

Romance gave Hawthorne resources to establish an independent imaginative space, to gain for his works freedom from compromising involvement with his personal political commitments as a Democratic party loyalist or with larger, national controversies over slavery. It defined the space of fictionality from which American literary narrative arose. Romance was the term by which American prose narrative first began to take over cultural authority from poetry, on the way to a new definition of literature.

In the early twenty-.first century, what American bookstores sell on the “Literature” shelves is serious fiction, that is, the kind that highbrow culture validates. This is the mode Hawthorne invented for the United States, in his extended works from The Scarlet Letter (1850) through The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860).