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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Recovering Pearl: Utopian Projections In Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter", Evan Weiss May 2023

Recovering Pearl: Utopian Projections In Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter", Evan Weiss

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Much of the recent scholarly criticism of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter aims to demonstrate the novel’s function as an allegory for Hawthorne’s anti-reformist (and especially anti-abolitionist) views at the height of the antebellum crisis. This commitment to revealing Hawthorne’s conservatism tends to cast the novel’s major figures as pieces within a self-balancing paradigm of good (intentions) and evil (acts) that ultimately symbolizes the author’s preference for inaction on the major political and humanitarian issue of his time—slavery. Curiously, however, the character of Pearl, Hester Prynne’s “wild,” “bird-like” child who dominates nearly every scene in which she appears, is almost …


Allegories Of The Heart, Fiona Robertson Dec 2018

Allegories Of The Heart, Fiona Robertson

Studies in Scottish Literature

"Allegories of the Heart" uses allegory (or "telling otherwise") as a means of investigating Scott’s presence in literary works which do not specifically adapt or rework his texts, arguing that this is an underexplored area of imaginative and figurative engagement with Scott’s work. Key texts are The Heart of Mid-Lothian, The Monastery, and Hawthorne’s fictions "Earth’s Holocaust" and The Scarlet Letter.


I Am Adele Bloch-Bauer, I Am Hester Prynne, Laurie Lico Albanese Mfa Jan 2016

I Am Adele Bloch-Bauer, I Am Hester Prynne, Laurie Lico Albanese Mfa

All Student Scholarship

I AM ADELE BLOCH-BAUER, I AM HESTER PRYNNE is a compilation of fiction and nonfiction. This cross-genre thesis includes two excerpts from historical novels with female protagonists, and an essay on women’s historical fiction. For the study and creation of female-centered historical fiction I researched and wrote in a wide range of areas, both intellectual and temporal. First, I read and traced the emergence of female-focused American historical fiction that began with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and continues today with historical fiction based in fact such as Lily King’s Euphoria and Paula McClain’s The Paris Wife and Circling the …


Hawthorne And The Christian Review: Three New Discoveries, Lisa Smith Sep 2015

Hawthorne And The Christian Review: Three New Discoveries, Lisa Smith

Lisa Smith

No abstract provided.


Mary Hallock Foote: Reconfiguring The Scarlet Letter, Redrawing Hester Prynne, Adam Sonstegard Jul 2015

Mary Hallock Foote: Reconfiguring The Scarlet Letter, Redrawing Hester Prynne, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

It took 28 years after Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850 for Mary Hallock Foote to render drawings for one of the novel’s first illustrated editions, which was probably the first ever to be illustrated by a woman.(1) It took 130 years after the publication of Foote’s illustrated edition in 1878 for Project Gutenberg to digitize and disseminate Hawthorne’s novel with Foote’s illustrations.(2) It has taken seven years for Hawthorne scholarship to commence addressing and examining Foote’s edition, and theorize what her drawings suggest about the act of seeing, for the heroine’s audiences in the book, and for …


Capitalism And "Blithedale": Exploring Hawthorne's Response To 19th Century American Capitalism, Kyle G. Phillips May 2015

Capitalism And "Blithedale": Exploring Hawthorne's Response To 19th Century American Capitalism, Kyle G. Phillips

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

With the intensive migration of the American public from rural to urban settings in the mid-nineteenth century came many logistical problems. Chief among them was the contention that the city was a place fundamentally void of, or else lax with morals. The examination into these issues explores why Americans felt the city was a catalyst for immorality, specifically examining prostitution and the exploitation of the working poor. It seeks to answer these questions within the framework of the anchor text, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Blithedale Romance”.


Moral Performances: Melodrama And Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Jeffrey Taylor Pusch Dec 2011

Moral Performances: Melodrama And Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Jeffrey Taylor Pusch

Dissertations

Despite a high number of ticket sales, theater reviews, and innumerable letters and diary entries detailing trips to the theater, the stereotype that theater in nineteenth-century America was almost culturally invisible continued well into the twentieth century. Indeed, a scan of anthologies of American literature fails to yield any examples of nineteenth-century drama, even though figures like Henry James were also theater critics and playwrights. Just as it did in American life, theater exhibits a strong presence in the literature of the time. Considering theater’s pervasiveness, this dissertation seeks to restore it to its proper place in our study of …


"Keep The Inmost Me Behind Its Veil:" Nathaniel Hawthorne's Manipulation Of Boundaries As Lessons In Craft, Molly Mary Mclaughlin Jun 2011

"Keep The Inmost Me Behind Its Veil:" Nathaniel Hawthorne's Manipulation Of Boundaries As Lessons In Craft, Molly Mary Mclaughlin

Graduate Masters Theses

In a letter written after her husband's death, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne spoke of a veil Nathaniel Hawthorne had drawn around himself during his life. This complicated metaphor is an echo from Hawthorne's work and life, where the construction of boundaries that are solid but not opaque, allow the writer to conceal and draw attention to the cart of concealment without revealing what, if anything, is hidden. That Hawthorne carefully considered what he would and would not reveal is clear in many of his works, and in pieces like "The Minister's Black Veil," where the act of concealment draws rather than …


Narrative Authority In Hawthorne's "The Ambitious Guest", Rebecca Belcher-Rankin Feb 2008

Narrative Authority In Hawthorne's "The Ambitious Guest", Rebecca Belcher-Rankin

Faculty Scholarship – English

August 28, 1826, a landslide in the White Mountains of New Hampshire caused the death of the Samuel Willey family when they left their home for a shelter. The slide split to either side of the house, leaving it intact while burying the family in the shelter. Hawthorne published the event as a short story in the New-England Journal, changing many aspects. Taking such liberties suggests that Hawthorne intended to use the account as fodder for his Romantic agenda: "to present [the] truth under circumstances... of the writer’s own choosing or creation." A close examination of the text reveals that …


The Scarlet Letter And The Red Star: Hawthorne's Appeal To China's Students Of American Literature, Geoffrey Kain Apr 1990

The Scarlet Letter And The Red Star: Hawthorne's Appeal To China's Students Of American Literature, Geoffrey Kain

Publications

Having taught numerous works of American literature -- novels, short stories, essays, poems -- for two and a half years to junior and senior undergraduates and graduate students of English literature and language in two Chinese universities (Fuzhou University and Xiamen University, both in the southeastern coastal province of Fujian, during 1984-1985 and 1986-1988), I have been struck by the almost unanimous recognition of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as the students' "number one." Other major works have their own peculiar merits, but none measures up to Hawthorne's novel. Huckleberry Finn? Noteworthy chiefly because of Huck's daring involvement in Black emancipation, …