2001 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
The Scarlet letter and Cultural Representation of 17th Century England
| Project/Area Number |
11610508
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
英語・英米文学
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| Research Institution | Kansai University |
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Principal Investigator |
IRIKO Fumiko Kansai University, Faculty of Letters, Professor, 文学部, 教授 (80151695)
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| Project Period (FY) |
1999 – 2001
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| Keywords | The Scarlet Letter / 17th century England / cultural representation / Renaissance / Hawthorne / classical melancholy / blackness |
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| Research Abstract |
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an author remarkable for his ability, to read and understand historical documents as marvelously as a first-class historian, and he was not, in this respect, an exception among 19th century authors. This is a fact widely recognized even along recent neo-historicist group represented by Michael J. Colacurcio. Historical approach to the Scarlet Letter of which the background is the early 17th century America is still vigorously undertaken. Looking back at the historical study of this romance, however, we cannot but assert that the studies made in this trend, though remarkable in the close attention to the Americanness, fatally suffer from the lack of the respect to the Englishness. Similarly fatal is the failure to make detailed observation of those cultural aspects. a failure due to their partial and prejudiced interest in the political or religious aspects. We may rightly ask if a true, authentic kind of the reading of historical texts could take place among the
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se types of historicists.
In this study of Hawthorne's the Scarlet Letter, exclusive, focus is thrown on the abundance of cultural representations imported from 17th century England by the first generation of the Puritan immigrants, and this new focus has enabled me to take further steps in the progress of my cultural-oriented study of Hawthorn's literature. This progress may strongly be illustrated in my new approach to the iconographies of the classical melancholy that had attracted people of the Renaissance. Consistent efforts have been made to trace the varieties of those melancholy iconographies. By adopting this new iconographical approach have been able to trace the new "vector" of the idea of "blackness" that was left unnoticed by critics whose minds were totally occupied by the conventional jargons and idioms of Puritanism. What is now left for me to do is publish the total results of my approach to The Scarlet Letter. What I am hereafter to do is to widen the scope of my study to the group of Hawthorne's romances, taking the similar methods of approaching the author's text, but with the wider view, not connect to the antiquated England only but also of more extensive perspective in Italy and other parts of Europe, Less
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Research Products
(13 results)
