On The Aesthetic Value Of The Scarlet Letter And Waiting From A New Criticism Perspective

The Scarlet Letter, which was published in1850, is the masterpiece of Nathanial Hawthome who was the most famous American novelist of his time. Hawthome, a spokesman of the psychological novel, was good at analyzing people’s inner heart. Schools concerned with "Hawthome study" are consequently coming into being. Meanwhile, a large mass of critical opinions have aroused on his novel in the West. Comparatively, even though as the representative writer of American overseas Chinese literature, Ha Jin’s famous work Waiting has won the National Book Award in1999and the PEN Faulkner Award for Fiction in2000, some critical books or papers are limited. Indeed, there are some papers on The Scarlet Letter, many of them are about social background, theme, language and so on, and for Waiting, most of them are about interview, book review and winning comments, merely focus on the comparative study of the two novels, so this paper aims to study from a different perspective point so as to arouse a deeper understanding of Waiting and The Scarlet Letter.This paper will focus on the tension and irony, which are the keynotes of New Criticism, to appreciate the Aesthetic Value. New Criticism is a very important genre in the western literature history. New Criticism emphasizes on text itself and gives comments through close reading. The key branches of this theory are tension and irony, which are reflected in Waiting and The Scarlet Letter for many times and will have a great support to dig the deeper understanding of Waiting and The Scarlet Letter.This thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter aims to talk about the two writers and their novels, to illustrate the significance of the research and briefly introduces the layout of the thesis.Chapter Two is divided into two parts. The former part is to analyze the tension between roles from morality and emotion side; the latter focuses on the male and female so as to understand the tension of the character itself. Chapter Three also consists of two parts. The first part attempts to focus on the context and the second part will be the structure, which serves as a good foundation for chapter four.Chapter Four will pay more attention to the study of the aesthetic value of the tension and irony, and then sublimate the theme.The last chapter is the conclusion of the whole paper and restates the paper’s main themes and also puts forward the possibilities of further research of this novel.