Can a theocracy be an effective type of government? Many object to this idea, but it was the basis of the Puritan religion, which reformed against the Catholic Church of England by placing their religion in the New England area. Theocracy is a government in which the church leaders are also the st...

A symbol is a person, place, thing or event that has meaning in itself and that also stands for something more. Direct statements of feeling can sometimes be inadequate; instead the use of striking symbols to evoke complexities of mood and meaning are much more interesting to read and analyze to...

AMERICAN GOTHIC: Tracing the Dark Romantic Through Irving, Hawthorne and Poe by Justin Cooper If we follow the stream of American romanticism through its shining era of the decades preceding the Civil War, we see a robust river of humanist thought: Emerson, Thoreau, Whittie...

"Nathaniel Hawthorne's work is typically fraught with symbolism, much of it deriving from his Puritan ancestry; a great-great uncle was actually a judge in the Salem witchcraft trials" (Roth 76). Not surprisingly, Hawthorne was obsessed with the twin themes of sin and guilt. Author John Roth not...

"Nathaniel Hawthorne's work is typically fraught with symbolism, much of it deriving from his Puritan ancestry; a great-great uncle was actually a judge in the Salem witchcraft trials" (Roth 76). Not surprisingly, Hawthorne was obsessed with the twin themes of sin and guilt. Author John Roth notes t...

Authors often use metaphors and symbols as techniques to make statements about characters. Character often lives parallel lives in novels and short stories and it is with great pleasure that we learn from them. Writers employ several different techniques to engage readers. Two stories that illustr...

Symbolism in The Scarlet Letter The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language describes a symbol as something that represents something else by association, resemblance, or convention, especially a material object used to represent something invisible. Nathaniel Hawthorne was known ...