What Do I Read Next?
Last Updated on July 29, 2019, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 281
- The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Hawthorne's third novel, which he personally thought was a better piece of work than The Scarlet Letter, about the cursed house of the Pyncheon family where the sins of fathers are passed on to their descendants.
- The Bird Artist, Howard Norman's recent (1994) novel about an artist in a small Newfoundland coastal village, is a story of crime and adultery in a place without the religious authority of Hawthorne's Boston.
- The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (1987) by Carol F. Karlsen shows that the violent Salem witch trials were not only directed primarily at women, but particularly women who stood to inherit property and, thus, power.
- William Cronon's Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, (1983) is a seminal work of environmental history that describes the impact the early settlers had on New England native peoples and the environment.
- Life in the Iron Mills (1861) by Rebecca Harding Davis is the powerful story of the physical and emotional oppression and struggle of a mid-nineteenth-century mill-worker. Published about a decade after Hawthorne's novel, it is even more of an anomaly in the context of literary transcendentalism.
- Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" (1849) was originally titled "Resistance to Civil Government." He argues here for the right of the individual to refuse to pay taxes or otherwise support civil authority against his or her conscience. Thoreau spent some time in jail when he did not pay taxes in 1843 in protest of the Mexican War.
- Harriet A. Jacobs's 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is a kind of "romance" slave narrative that ties sexuality to race in pre-Civil War America.
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