추가 적립 안내

Why read The Scarlet Letter? 8
Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804-1864 10
Timeline of the novel 12
The Custom-House 15
Hawthorne's Customs House 50
The Scarlet Letter 53
The Prison-Door 53
The Market-Place 55
Early Boston 64
The Recognition 66
The Interview 74
Medicine 80
Hester at Her Needle 82
Pearl 91
The Governor's Hall 100
The Elf-Child and the Minister 107
The Leech 115
Puritan religion 124
The Leech and His Patient 126
The Interior of a Heart 135
The Minister's Vigil 141
Another View of Hester 152
Puritan women 158
Hester and the Physician 160
Hester and Pearl 166
Crime and punishment 172
A Forest Walk 174
The Pastor and His Parishioner 180
A Flood of Sunshine 188
The Child at the Brook-Side 194
Witchcraft 200
TheMinister in a Maze 202
The New England Holiday 212
Transcendentalism 220
The Procession 222
The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter 232
Conclusion 240
Glossary 246
Discussion questions 268
Further reading 270
Acknowledgments 271

'Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me.'

With these chilling words a husband claims his wife after a two-year absence. But the child she clutches is not his, and Hester must wear a scarlet 'A' upon her breast, the sin of adultery visible to all. Under an assumed name her husband begins his search for her lover, determined to expose what Hester is equally determined to protect. Defiant and proud, Hester witnesses the degradation of two very different men, as moral codes and legal imperatives painfully collide.

Set in the Puritan community of seventeenth-century Boston, The Scarlet Letter also sheds light on the nineteenth-century in which it was written, as Hawthorne explores his ambivalent relations with his Puritan forebears. The text of this edition is taken from the Centenary Edition of Hawthorne's works, the most authoritative critical edition.


Readership: Readers and students of classic fiction, American literature, Nineteenth-century American Literature and Culture, Sentimental/Romance fiction, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe courses.