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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Recovering Pearl: Utopian Projections In Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter", Evan Weiss
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
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.
"Keep The Inmost Me Behind Its Veil:" Nathaniel Hawthorne's Manipulation Of Boundaries As Lessons In Craft, Molly Mary Mclaughlin
"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 …
The Scarlet Letter And The Red Star: Hawthorne's Appeal To China's Students Of American Literature, Geoffrey Kain
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, …