The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings: Authoritative Texts, Contexts, Criticism [A Norton Critical Edition]

Nathaniel Hawthorne (Author); Leland S. Person (Edited by)

ISBN 10: 0393979539 / ISBN 13: 9780393979534

Published by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York & London, 2005

About this Item

744 + pp. A perfectly acceptable study or work or reading or research copy! Well bound copy with extensive external and internal wear. Pen markings, highlighting, marginalia throughout text. Previous owner's name written on fore edge. Over-sized and/or over weight book; may require additional postage. Please note that large and/or heavy items may incur extra shipping charge for both domestic and/or international shipments.

Seller Inventory # 5iiAf0018

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings: Authoritative Texts, Contexts, Criticism [A Norton Critical Edition]
• Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York & London
• Publication Date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393979539
• ISBN 13: 9780393979534
• Binding: Trade Paperback
• Illustrator: PennSet, Inc. (Composition)
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Used-Acceptable
• Seller catalogs:
  • Textbooks, Academic, Scholarly
  • Americana, American Art
  • Academic, Scholarly, Research

About this title

Synopsis

The text of The Scarlet Letter is based on the 1850 third edition, the first set in stereotype plates and the basis of subsequent printings in Hawthorne’s lifetime. An invaluable selection of contextual material includes five Hawthorne stories that are closely related to The Scarlet Letter, along with relevant letters and notebook entries. A substantial excerpt from Hawthorne’s campaign biography of Franklin Pierce offers a revealing glimpse at Hawthorne’s political thought, especially regarding slavery and abolition. "Criticism" provides a comprehensive overview of early and modern commentary on The Scarlet Letter and the stories in this edition, including nineteenth-century reviews of the novel and critical essays by Robert S. Levine, Nina Baym, Larry J. Reynolds, and Jean Fagan Yellin. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

About the Authors

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE was four years old when his father, a sea captain, died in 1808. He grew up under the roof of his maternal uncles in Salem, Massachusetts, and attended Bowdoin College in Maine, where he discovered his vocation as a writer. The publication of his short story “Young Goodman Brown” in 1835 was followed by the collections Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). The latter took its name from the house in Concord, Massachusetts, where he and his wife, Sophia, lived after their marriage in 1842. Unable to earn a living from his writing, he sought employment as a government bureaucrat, first in the Salem Custom House and later as United States consul in Liverpool, England. Despite his chronic financial insecurity, he continued to produce such notable works as The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860). He died in Plymouth, New Hampshire, in 1864.

Leland S. Person is Professor and Head of the English Department at the University of Cincinnati. He previously taught at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and Indiana University, Fort Wayne. His is the author of Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity, Aesthetic Headaches: Women and Masculine Poetics in Poe, Melville, and Hawthorn, and many articles on nineteenth-century American writers, especially Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Henry James, and James Fenimore Cooper. He recently coedited (with Robert K. Martin) a collection of essays, Roman Holidays: American Writers and Artists in Nineteenth-Century Italy.