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

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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, …