The Element of Witchcraft in The Scarlet Letter

allegories,' he evidently had in mind that type of symbolistic narrative in which there is no pretense of realism at the surface level, the characters being created as personifications of abstract ideas and the story told merely for the sake of the non-literal level of meaning. Such, for example, is 'The Celestial Railroad,' with its obvious indebtedness to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Hawthorne was well aware that there is a more sophisticated kind of allegory in which the surface story is consistently realistic, in which the events and characters are presented for their own sake even though, from the author's point of view, the literal story may be less important than the non-literal level or levels of meaning. As Mark Van Doren pointed out

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• Folklore and Literature

  H R Ellis Davidson•Folklore•1975

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