Word: scarlets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...John Updike reaches back 200 years to put himself in direct dialogue with another great realist. New England Puritan writer, Nathaniel Hawthrone. Though the pastoral New England village of The Scarlet Letter belongs to history, Updike explores the same questions which perplexed that less permissive landscape. The notions of tradition, morality, religion and womanhood that dominate Hawthrone's 18th century world are also Updike's concerns...
...Updike plays with the narrative ofThe Scarlet Letter, he also experiments with its voice. Hawthorne spoke about Hester Prynne by narrating her story. Updike allows Sarah to speak for herself by assuming her voice in as direct a way as possible. As an epistolary novel, S. enables Updike to be privy to Sarah's psyche, whether she is addressing her accountant, her dentist, her hairdresser or her family...
...John Updike (Knopf; $17.95). In this modern Scarlet Letter, a Massachusetts wife flees to a zany Arizona ashram, recounting her adventures in penetrating (and sometimes scarlet) letters...
...brought low by carnal temptation. The image may seem to leap from today's headlines, but Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker are only the latest in a long line that stretches back to the fictional Arthur Dimmesdale, yearning for Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. After such falls from grace are revealed, the question always arises: Were the sinners truly devout souls brought to perdition or fiendish fakers from the start? That is precisely the issue raised by American literature's most exuberant portrait of religious hysteria and hypocrisy, Sinclair Lewis' 1927 Elmer Gantry...
...with it went the great symbols of the rivalry--Scarlet versus Red. Jim Craig versus Darren Eliot. B.U.'s six ECAC titles versus Cornell's five. And, of course, fish versus chickens...