/lit/ - Literature

>>20358307
Atheist simp and cuck loses to Christian chad

>>20358307
Kek. In my 11th grade English class our teacher gave each of us the choice to read either Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye, or Scarlet Letter. He read the opening passages from each of those books before we decided. Nobody chose The Scarlet Letter.

>>20358337
This is a huge reason. The book is assigned as high school reading when it absolutely should not be. High schoolers are too stupid for Hawthorne. I reread the book in graduate school as part of a Hawthorne/Melville class and I fell in love with it. It's great.

It's particularly cool when you know that Hawthorne was probably heavily influenced by Dante and the Divine Comedy. The way Hawthorne plays around with the idea of Symbol, of characters simultaneously being fully-fleshed out people and also symbols of something else, is pure Dante. Hawthorne was good friends with Longfellow and so would have been aware of the attempts to translate the Comedy into English. Hawthorne himself could read Italian so he could have read Dante in the original.

The intro to The Scarlet Letter is also very Dante-esque.

He spends the first 25 pages or so bitching about people he used to work with with the flimsy excuse of working at the custom house is how he found the manuscript of the story of Hester Prynn

>>20358307
the thumbnail made me think it was the culture of critique

>>20358622
What does Hawthorne have in common with Melville? The use of symbolism?
t. has read neither

>>20358307
Fascinating cover, looks very similar to an excellent book I know of.

>>20359020
They, along with Poe, are the fathers of dark romanticism

>>20358307
That cover looks familiar...

>>20359811
poe is an actual romantic though, melville and hawthorne are "post" romantics at best or whatever you want to call them. The mid 1800s writers should not be lumped in with the ones at the turn of the 19th century