Current Bibliography

Bibliographies

Mitchell, Christopher. "Current Bibliography." Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 41.1 (Spring 2015): 103-116.

Roggenkamp, Karen. "Nathaniel Hawthorne." American Literary Scholarship 2013. Ed. Gary E. Scharnhorst and David J. Nordloh. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 2015. 23-36.

Editions

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. New York: Penguin, 2016.

This revised edition includes an introduction by Robert Milder, notes by Thomas E. Connolly, and a forward by Tom Perrotta.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings. 2nd edition. Ed. Leland S. Person. New York: W.W. Norton, 2016.

In this edition, Leland S. Person offers revised footnotes, a new preface, and an introduction to Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. It also incorporates critical essays by Brook Thomas, Michael Ryan, Thomas R. Mitchell, Jay Grossman, Jamie Barlowe, John Ronan, and John E Birk. Included as well are five short prose works-"Mrs. Hutchison," "Endicott and the Red Cross," Young Goodman Brown," "The Minister's Black Veil," and "The Birth-mark"-and primary source material from Hawthorne's notebooks and letters.

Books

Valenti, Patricia Dunlavy. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Volume 2, 1848-1871. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2015.

In this volume, Patricia Dunlavy Valenti examines the second half of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne's life. Valenti investigates her role as an artist, writer, and traveler, and highlights her contributions to Nathaniel Hawthorne's literary career. Valenti distinguishes Sophia Peabody Hawthorne from her husband's literary shadow by emphasizing how her life reflects and deviates from conventional understandings of class, gender, and national identity in nineteenth-century America.

Chapters in Books

Barton, John Cyril. "Hawthorne and the Evidentiary Value of Literature." Literary Executions: Capital Punishment and American Culture, 1820-1925. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014. 138-173.

John Cyril Barton's chapter considers depictions of the death penalty in Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, anti-gallows reform, and the Knapp and Webster murder trials. Barton claims that, although Hawthorne was not opposed to the death penalty, he "recognized that to convict someone of capital punishment requires certain proof of guilt" ( 140). Barton emphasizes Hawthorne's belief that "an approximation of certainty may not be enough when the irreversible penalty of death is at stake" (159). This perspective leads Hawthorne to "unsettle the privileged status granted to circumstantial evidence" by making "direct evidence in The House of the Seven Gables . . . equally problematic"...