"The Scarlet Letter" in Contemporary Criticism

Master's Thesis from the year 2009 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: A, University of Belgrade (Anglistics Department), course: English and American Literature, language: English, abstract: This paper gives a brief overview of Hawthorne¿s most important and famous work "The Scarlet Letter" from the point of view of five contemporary theories of criticism: Psychoanalytic Criticism, Reader-Response Criticism, Feminist Criticism, Deconstruction and The New Historicism.

"The Scarlet Letter" was first published in 1850, but its genesis can be found in tales and sketches Hawthorne wrote some years before he began to work on this novel. Being a Puritan descendent, in one of those sketches from 1845 he speculates about what life would be like for a young woman who would be condemned always to wear the letter A for having committed adultery. For Hawthorne this is a moral tale; the wild rose in the opening chapter points out the novel¿s moral purpose: it is our duty to show to the world our true nature.