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This reference guides scholars through the vast amount of literary criticism devoted to Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" between 1950 and 2000. Following introductory information on the work's initial reception are some 800 cross-referenced bibliographical entries--arranged first by decade, and then alphabetically by author. Muirhead's annotations illuminate the principal arguments and describe the theoretical models used by the authors. The volume is indexed by author, subject, and critical approach. Muirhead (Duquesne U.) has published three prior bibliographic studies on Hawthorne in the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review.
This timely and provocative collection of sixteen essays combines feminist and psychoanalytic approaches to literary theory and to the reading of literary texts. It demonstrates not only the ways in which psychoanalytic theory can illuminate traditional literary texts, but also the ways in which feminist theory can modify, enlarge, and in some instances transform the body of psychoanalytic literature. Treating psychoanalysis as a form of narrative as well as a method of interpretation, the editors have divided their collection into three sections: 1) interpretations of the relation between contemporary feminism and Freud; 2) rereadings of classic patriarchal texts in the light of psychoanalytic feminism; and 3) readings of texts by women writers that have subverted patriarchal structures and given authoritative new voice to the maternal figure. Many of the essays make original contributions to the current debate about the conjunction of Freud and feminism; others offer innovative readings of specific texts that illustrate the significance of that relation. The Introduction provides an up-to-date survey of feminist psychoanalytic theory and enumerates the central issues. Because of the diversity of critical perspectives it offers and the range of texts it considers, this rich and important book will attract a broad spectrum of readers.
Narrative is a powerful element of human culture, storing and sharing the cherished parts of our personal memories and giving structure to our laws, entertainment, and history. This text presents a wide-ranging and wholly original approach to understanding the nature of narrative.
In the view of David Leverenz, such nineteenth-century American male writers as Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman were influenced more profoundly by the popular model of the entrepreneurial "man of force" than they were by their literary precursors and contemporaries. Drawing on the insights of feminist theory, gender studies, psychoanalytical criticism, and social history, Manhood and the American Renaissance demonstrates that gender pressures and class conflicts played as critical a role in literary creation for the male writers of nineteenth-century America as they did for the women writers. Leverenz interprets male American authors in terms of three major ideologies of manhood linked to the social classes in the Northeast-patrician, artisan, and entrepreneurial. He asserts that the older ideologies of patrician gentility and of artisan independence were being challenged from 1820 to 1860 by the new middle-class ideology of competitive individualism. The male writers of the American Renaissance, patrician almost without exception in their backgrounds and self-expectations, were fascinated yet horrified by the aggressive materialism and the rivalry for dominance they witnessed in the undeferential "new men." In close readings of the works both of well-known male literary figures and of then popular authors such as Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and Francis Parkman, Leverenz discovers a repressed center of manhood beset by fears of humiliation and masochistic fantasies. He discerns different patterns in the works of Whitman, with his artisan's background, and Frederick Douglass, who rose from artisan freedom to entrepreneurial power. Emphasizing the interplay of class and gender, Leverenz also considers how women viewed manhood. He concludes that male writers portrayed manhood as a rivalry for dominance, but contemporary female writers saw it as patriarchy. Two chapters contrast the work of the genteel writers Sarah Hale and Caroline Kirkland with the evangelical works of Susan Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe. A bold and imaginative work, Manhood and the American Renaissance will enlighten and inspire controversy among all students of American literature, nineteenth-century American history, and the relation of gender and literature.
Adultery, it is often assumed, was not a major concern of English culture during the Victorian age, and the apparent absence of adultery—indeed, of all explicit representations of sexuality—in turn made censorship for obscene libel unnecessary. Very few writers, conventional wisdom has it, were bold enough to defy the powerful implicit constraints imposed upon literary production. If we find no English Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, Barbara Leckie nevertheless demonstrates that adultery preoccupied English culture during this period. After the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 was passed, adultery was prominently discussed in the Divorce Court. Transcriptions of divorce trials were an immensely popular front-page feature of almost all daily newspapers for more than fifty years. At the same time as narratives of adultery stood at the center of sensation novels such as Mary Elizabeth Bradden's The Doctor's Wife, literary reviews and cultural debates strongly encouraged serious novelists to avoid the topic. In Culture and Adultery, Leckie mines novels, newspapers, court and Parliamentary records to explore several related sets of issues. How, first, did adultery become "visible" in the public sphere in the second half of the nineteenth century? Why, conversely, has the discursive history of adultery been deemphasized in the English critical tradition? And how is the history of the Victorian and early twentieth-century English novel revised when the culture's concern with adultery and censorship are reintroduced?