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Approaching The Scarlet Letter: Spatiality As Theme And Method, Susan L. Scott

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Although my goal is ultimately to undersatnd Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, the emphasis of this thesis is upon ways of approaching that goal. Only the last chapter is directly about the text of that romance. In the first chapter I consider the state of the field, religion and literature, with a view to identifying my own position in it. In the second, I look at the cultural historical contexts for reading the story, specifically, the seventeenth century Puritans and the nineteenth century American romance. The third chapter focuses on variants of the idea of spatiality, for instance, sacred space, topophilia, …