Author: Nathaniel HawthornePublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 362
Book Description
The Scarlet Letter
Author: Nathaniel HawthorneThe Ambiguity of the Letter 'A' in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter"
Author: Kathrin GerbePublisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638791130
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 40
Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Siegen, course: More Than a Renaissance: Romantic Writers in America, 10 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The Scarlet Letter is Nathaniel Hawthorne's first novel and was published in 1850. Its subtitle A Romance consciously places the novel apart from everyday life. Set in 17th century Boston it tells a story about sin, guilt and love. As the moral values back then still were in force among Hawthorne's contemporaries, he uses the imaginative and symbolic form of the romance to alleviate the impression of the unusual themes in his novel. This essay discusses the ambiguity of the letter A that the protagonist Hester Prynne has to wear as a punishment for adultery. The letter assumes a different and ever-changing meaning for the characters of the novel, from accusation and sin to a new beginning and freedom.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Author: Elmer Kennedy-AndrewsPublisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231121903
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Book Description
Introduces and sets in context the enormous range of critical arguments that have been generated by this enduring work. From the comments and reviews of Hawthorne's contemporaries through discussions of the novel by fellow artists such as Henry James and D.H. Lawrence, to radical re-readings of the postwar decades, the reader is given an invaluable guide to the critical progress of this key American text.
Historically motivated gender ambiguity in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter"
Author: Bettina SiebertPublisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668906661
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 20
Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Rostock (Anglistik/ Amerikanistik), course: Early American Literature, US History and Its Aftermath, language: English, abstract: Breaking with the tradition of examining "The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne for traces of (proto-)feminism, the paper approaches the idea of gender in analyzing the interplay of the time periods underlying the literary work - the 19th century as the time of writing and Puritan times as the setting of the plot. In the 200 years between the two moments, ideas of gender have changed with commencing ideas of female empowerment in Hawthorne's time. Looking at the shifting understanding of gender, the construction of femininity and masculinity is analyzed with a focus on the two protagonists - Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. Overall, the gender relations between the two main characters change into opposite directions. Thus, Hawthorne's writing destabilizes conventional Puritan ideas of pre-ascribed spheres and gender roles. It has become an academic tradition over the past decades to scrutinize historical literary pieces for traces of feminism. Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" has been a prime object of interest for several scholars in this pursuit. The story of Hester Prynne who is outlawed by Puritan society after having committed adultery represents an early work to have a protagonist who breaks with the law of her time. This might be the reason why in an earlier tradition the novel has been read with Arthur Dimmesdale, the young reverend and Hester's lover, as the central figure. Approaches involving feminism and gender studies challenged this reading. Their focus however primarilyseems to be the tracing of feminist attitudes in Hawthorne's writing. In this approach the historical perspective of the literary work is often read from a contemporary angle creating a hybrid reading that involves three time frames, namely the Puritan time of theplot, the 19th century setting of the novel's writing and the contemporary moment of thenovel's reading.
The Scarlet Letter
Author: Nathaniel HawthornePublisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780142437261
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
A young woman, publicly scorned for bearing an illegitimate child, refuses to be vanquished by the seventeenth-century Boston community.
The Orchid Thief
Author: Susan OrleanPublisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0307795292
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322
Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK A modern classic of personal journalism, The Orchid Thief is Susan Orlean’s wickedly funny, elegant, and captivating tale of an amazing obsession. Determined to clone an endangered flower—the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii—a deeply eccentric and oddly attractive man named John Laroche leads Orlean on an unforgettable tour of America’s strange flower-selling subculture, through Florida’s swamps and beyond, along with the Seminoles who help him and the forces of justice who fight him. In the end, Orlean—and the reader—will have more respect for underdog determination and a powerful new definition of passion. In this new edition, coming fifteen years after its initial publication and twenty years after she first met the “orchid thief,” Orlean revisits this unforgettable world, and the route by which it was brought to the screen in the film Adaptation, in a new retrospective essay. Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more. Praise for The Orchid Thief “Stylishly written, whimsical yet sophisticated, quirkily detailed and full of empathy . . . The Orchid Thief shows [Orlean’s] gifts in full bloom.”—The New York Times Book Review “Fascinating . . . an engrossing journey [full] of theft, hatred, greed, jealousy, madness, and backstabbing.”—Los Angeles Times “Orlean’s snapshot-vivid, pitch-perfect prose . . . is fast becoming one of our national treasures.”—The Washington Post Book World “Orlean’s gifts [are] her ear for the self-skewing dialogue, her eye for the incongruous, convincing detail, and her Didion-like deftness in description.”—Boston Sunday Globe “A swashbuckling piece of reporting that celebrates some virtues that made America great.”—The Wall Street Journal
The American Adam
Author: R. W. B. LewisPublisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226476810
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212
Book Description
The first really original book on the classical period in American writing that has appeared for a long time.
When She Woke
Author: Hillary JordanPublisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616201843
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Book Description
Bellwether Prize winner Hillary Jordan’s provocative new novel, When She Woke, tells the story of a stigmatized woman struggling to navigate an America of a not-too-distant future, where the line between church and state has been eradicated and convicted felons are no longer imprisoned and rehabilitated but chromed—their skin color is genetically altered to match the class of their crimes—and then released back into the population to survive as best they can. Hannah is a Red; her crime is murder. In seeking a path to safety in an alien and hostile world, Hannah unknowingly embarks on a path of self-discovery that forces her to question the values she once held true and the righteousness of a country that politicizes faith.
The scarlet letter. The house of the seven gables, a romance
Author: Nathaniel HawthorneHawthorne
Author: Brenda WineapplePublisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307808661
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 530
Book Description
Handsome, reserved, almost frighteningly aloof until he was approached, then playful, cordial, Nathaniel Hawthorne was as mercurial and double-edged as his writing. “Deep as Dante,” Herman Melville said. Hawthorne himself declared that he was not “one of those supremely hospitable people who serve up their own hearts, delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit” for the public. Yet those who knew him best often took the opposite position. “He always puts himself in his books,” said his sister-in-law Mary Mann, “he cannot help it.” His life, like his work, was extraordinary, a play of light and shadow. In this major new biography of Hawthorne, the first in more than a decade, Brenda Wineapple, acclaimed biographer of Janet Flanner and Gertrude and Leo Stein (“Luminous”–Richard Howard), brings him brilliantly alive: an exquisite writer who shoveled dung in an attempt to found a new utopia at Brook Farm and then excoriated the community (or his attraction to it) in caustic satire; the confidant of Franklin Pierce, fourteenth president of the United States and arguably one of its worst; friend to Emerson and Thoreau and Melville who, unlike them, made fun of Abraham Lincoln and who, also unlike them, wrote compellingly of women, deeply identifying with them–he was the first major American writer to create erotic female characters. Those vibrant, independent women continue to haunt the imagination, although Hawthorne often punishes, humiliates, or kills them, as if exorcising that which enthralls. Here is the man rooted in Salem, Massachusetts, of an old pre-Revolutionary family, reared partly in the wilds of western Maine, then schooled along with Longfellow at Bowdoin College. Here are his idyllic marriage to the youngest and prettiest of the Peabody sisters and his longtime friendships, including with Margaret Fuller, the notorious feminist writer and intellectual. Here too is Hawthorne at the end of his days, revered as a genius, but considered as well to be an embarrassing puzzle by the Boston intelligentsia, isolated by fiercely held political loyalties that placed him against the Civil War and the currents of his time. Brenda Wineapple navigates the high tides and chill undercurrents of Hawthorne’s fascinating life and work with clarity, nuance, and insight. The novels and tales, the incidental writings, travel notes and children’s books, letters and diaries reverberate in this biography, which both charts and protects the dark unknowable core that is quintessentially Hawthorne. In him, the quest of his generation for an authentically American voice bears disquieting fruit.