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"Residual" because, as these critics explain, by the time Hawthorne wrote his romances, the near-mythical eighteenth-century legal paradigm of the right of property was no longer regarded as either philosophically indisputable or rhetorically sound. Critics such as Walter Benn Michaels, Brook Thomas, and Gillian Brown have argued that the system of "laws" and "private rights" that the romance is defined through and is anxious to protect is the primary, yet residual, right of property.
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Indeed, this contiguity of the legal and the literary in the preface has inspired some of the most important work on the Hawthornian romance in recent years. Hawthorne's definition of romance, thus, spills over from the purely literary into the legal domain: the "laws" that regulate its mode of representation involve those that safeguard the right of individuals to keep their affairs private, while the "privilege" of the imagination claimed by the romance writer protects his work from charges of "unpardonable" infringement upon that right. into positive contact with the realities of the moment," and thereby expose the romance "to an inflexible and exceedingly dangerous species of criticism." In different terms, "e trusts not to be considered as unpardonably offending, by laying out a street that infringes upon nobody's private rights and appropriating a lot of land which has no visible owner" and urges that the book be read "strictly as a Romance" (352-53). Here, in a judicious disclaimer (that has since become standard in fictional works), Hawthorne cautions his readers not bring "his fancy-pictures. This famous definition of romance is at this point misleadingly simple for what precisely is that system of "laws," "rights" and "privileges" to which the romance writer must adhere? Are those laws that delimit and determine the genre, that is, strictly aesthetic ones? The last paragraph of the same preface suggests otherwise. Romance, Hawthorne explains in the first paragraph of the preface to The House of the Seven Gables, must "rigidly subject itself to laws," even as it claims for itself - in contradistinction to the novel-"a right," or "privileges" of representational latitude and of the freedom of the imagination.