A comparison of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown' and Robert Burns' 'Tam OShanter' sheds light on the critical strategies the authors developed in adapting folk materials in a milieu awash with literary nationalism. This essay appears in _Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic: Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism_, a volume of _Romantic Circles Praxis Series_, prepared exclusively for Romantic Circles (http://www.rc.umd.edu/), University of Maryland.