Scarlet Letter (John Harvard Library) (The John Harvard Library)

by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  

  $30.84

  Nathaniel Hawthorne's greatest romance, The Scarlet Letter , is often simplistically seen as a timeless tale of desire, sin, and redemption. This work argues that The Scarlet Letter is a serious historical novel.

• Used

  Paperback
  2007

  $3.29

  Set in the harsh Puritan community of seventeenth-century Boston, this tale of an adulterous entanglement that results in an illegitimate birth reveals Nathaniel Hawthorne's concerns with the tension between the public and the private selves. Publicly disgraced and ostracized, Hester Prynne draws on her inner strength and certainty of spirit to emerge as the first true heroine of American fiction. Arthur Dimmesdale stands as a classic study of a seld divided; trapped by the rules of society, he suppresses his passion and disavows his lover, Hester, and their daughter, Pearl. As Nina Baym writes in her Introduction, The Scarlet Letter was not written as realistic, historical fiction, but as a romance , a creation of the imagination that discloses the truth of the human heart.

• New

  Paperback
  1992

  $6.81

  Introduction and Notes by Henry Claridge, Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of Kent at Canterbury. This is a troubling story of crime, sin, guilt, punishment and expiation, set in the rigid moral climate of 17th-century New England. The young mother of an illegitimate child confronts her Puritan judges. However, it is not so much her harsh sentence, but the cruelties of slowly exposed guilt as her lover is revealed, that hold the reader enthralled all the way to the book's poignant climax.

• New

  Hardcover
  1992

  $23.18