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The Scarlet Letter
Paperback
Series: Contested Classics
Publisher Price: $21.99
ISBN13: 9781963549362
Publisher: Broad Book Press
Published: Oct 27 2026
Pages: 180
Language: English
Everyone assumes The Scarlet Letter is about sex. It isn't.
There's no scene of it in the entire novel and that gap between reputation and text is exactly why this Contested Classics edition exists.
Dr. Michelle Parrinello-Cason opens the book by directly debunking the 'erotic tale' marketing (1995 film, Easy A, sorry Emma!) that drives most real-world challenges, then annotates the book's actual argument: power, hypocrisy, and religion used to control people.
This edition pairs Hawthorne's complete 1850 novel with running annotations by Dr. Michelle Parrinello-Cason, the fourth volume she's annotated for the series. Rather than treating The Scarlet Letter as a period romance, the annotations track what the book actually argues: a layered critique of Puritan power structures that Hawthorne aimed as much at his own 1850s America as at the 1640s setting; and that many teachers assigning it today would say lands just as hard now.
Annotations spotlight the novel's central literary devices (its 'found document' narrative frame, the shifting symbolism of the scarlet A, Hawthorne's rich imagery, and its layered dramatic irony) while growing sparser near the novel's end so readers can navigate the emotional conclusion with their own footing. A closing set of discussion prompts, organized around contested-book framing, literary devices, character analysis, and thematic analysis, makes this a ready-made classroom and book-club companion as well as a standalone reading edition.
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