"Young Goodman Brown" as rpt. in Hawthorne's Mosses (1846)

        "Young Goodman Brown"'s next appearance in print was under Hawthorne's name in his short story collection, Mosses from an Old Manse (N.Y.: Wiley and Putnam, 1846).  As in the case of Snow-Image, the publishers allowed Hawthorne to order the stories and see the edition through the press, so the story immediately before "YGB" and the one immediately after it should be of some interest, especially because we will read the following tale next. 

        This sumptuously bound copy was owned by two famous collectors, one of whom put his bookplate on a front flyleaf, and the other of whom stamped his name on the cover in gold.  Knowing more about when these collectors bought the Mosses first edition and about the relative worth of the binding may tell you something interesting about the growth of Hawthorne's literary fame.

Strategy 1--read "YGB" in the context of the story that came before it: When first published in The New England Magazine, "YGB" was the first story readers would have encountered and must have been quite a shock.  Hawthorne relocates it after "A Select Party" (52-83), an openly allegorical cultural satire of the American literary scene in the 1840s.  What would be the effect on readers in 1846 of moving from "A Select Party" (first published anonymously in the 1832 Token with "MK,MM") to "YGB"? How might this openly allegorical story shape readers' reaction to the allegorical elements of "YGB"?  Do the Salem setting and the plot's association with the witch trials have more or less impact after the airy satire of the previous story?  This project also might benefit from a concluding look at the effect of the shift from "ASP" to "YGB" to "R's D" (see below).

Strategy 2--read "YGB" in the context of the story that came after it: "Rappaccini's Daughter" (85-118), but not with the "Writings of Aubepine" preface which we find in The United States Magazine edition in 1844.  What is the effect of moving from "YGB"'s last words, "for his dying hour was gloom," to the introduction of Giovanni's encounter with Beatrice?  How might  "YGB"'s play between the conventions of allegory and those of fictional realism shape or become altered by readers' encounter with Rappaccini's garden and Baglioni's "antidote"?  You might have to limit yourself to one crucial scene or two in "R's D" to explore "YGB"'s possible influences on our interpretation, or you might look cumulatively at the way the male protagonists interact with the female protagonists.