Synopses & Reviews
Hawthorne's greatest romance,
The Scarlet Letter, is often simplistically seen as a timeless tale of desire, sin, and redemption. In his introduction, Michael J. Colacurcio argues that
The Scarlet Letter is a serious historical novel. If Hawthorne's fiction rigorously and faithfully subjects Hester and Dimmesdale to the limits of seventeenth-century possibility, it nonetheless looks forward to the better, brighter world of Margaret Fuller and Fanny Fern, of Charles Fourier and John Humphrey Noyes.
The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the authoritative text of The Scarlet Letter in the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
About the Author
Michael J. Colacurcio is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of several books, including The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne's Early Tales and Godly Letters: The Literature of the American Puritans.
UCLA
Table of Contents
- Introduction to The Scarlet Letter
- A Preface to the Text
- Textual Introduction: The Scarlet Letter
- Preface to the Second Edition
- The Custom-House-Introductory
- The Prison-Door
- The Market-Place
- The Recognition
- The Interview
- Hester at Her Needle
- Pearl
- The Governor's Hall
- The Elf-Child and the Minister
- The Leech
- The Leech and His Patient
- The Interior of a Heart
- The Minister's Vigil
- Another View of Hester
- Hester and the Physician
- Hester and Pearl
- A Forest Walk
- The Pastor and His Parishioner
- A Flood of Sunshine
- The Child at the Brook-Side
- The Minister in a Maze
- The New England Holiday
- The Procession
- The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter
- Conclusion
- Variants in the First Edition
- Variants in the Second Edition
- Editorial Emendations in the Copy-Text
- Textual Notes
- Historical Collation
- Word-Division
- Special Collation List: Variants between the First and Second Editions
- Appendix to the Third Printing