The Gnosis of Hawthorne and Melville
An Interpretation of the Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2731972 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Viola Sachs (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1980 |
| Volume | 32 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 123 |
| Publication date | 1980-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-0678 • E-ISSN: 1080-6490 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2712559 |
| OpenAlex | W2327133880 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
THE SCARLET LETTER AND MOBY-DICK ABOUND IN REFERENCES TO hidden meanings and clues, mysterious master-words, unknown tongues, apparently expressive of the gothic romantic literary fashion. I propose to show that, above all, they reflect the very essence of those works which are both in their nature and form. Each is conceived as a liber mundi, that is, as being the manifestation of the divine and offering the revelation of the divine Wisdom, whatever its nature may be.' Reading thus becomes an initiatic quest leading to the revelation of the origins of life, of the Invisible, which is simultaneously the organizing principle or vital center of the volume = liber mundi = manifestation of the author's cosmic creation. The book contains what the author considers to be the original Word, which has been submerged by the crass materialism of America, the dominance of the White Man and his value system to the detriment and exclusion of those of the Red-Man and the Black Man. The indictment goes beyond America to Christianity, to the institutionalization of one creed, one truth to the exclusion of all others. To the reader who discovers or rediscovers the lost Word,2 the volume becomes
Art · Interpretation (philosophy · Linguistics · Literature · History · Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics · Philosophy · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.07 |
| Citation span | 1986 - 2019 (34) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |