This book is a collection of critical essays on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) - one of the most influential American works of fiction. The presented interpretations deal not only with the principal characters of the novel, but also with "The Custom-House", the Spanish sailors, the Book of Revelations, and the artist as adulterer. The critical tools employed include allegory, the Biedermeier, hermeneutical exposition, semiosis of the infans, and triangular desire. This publication is dedicated to the memory of Andrzej Kopcewicz (1934-2007), the first professor ordinarius of American literature in the history of English studies in Poland, on the tenth anniversary of his death.

This collection of essays is a tribute to Andrzej Kopcewicz, the first professor ordinarius of American literature in the history of English studies in Poland. It coincides with the centenary of Imagism and what would have been Professor Kopcewicz's 80th birthday. The title alludes to his first book which was devoted to the image and the objective correlative in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry. Image in Modern(ist) Verse opens with a revised and abridged version of that publication. Kopcewicz's study can be still read as a useful historical, theoretical, and practical introduction to modern poetry. The bulk of the volume is made up of contributions by contemporary academics - Paulina Ambrozy, Joseph Kuhn, Pawel Stachura, Jorgen Veisland, and Milosz Wojtyna - who discuss various facets, strands and sub-strands of Imagism, as well as its ongoing legacy.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's status as an artist rests as much on The Scarlet Letter as on his short fictions. It is both telling and appropriate that academic research in the short story should be dated to Mary Rohrberger's study Hawthorne and the Modern Short Story, published in 1966. The present volume adds to this discourse with contributions by Paulina Ambrozy, Katarzyna Kuczma, Joseph Kuhn, David Malcolm, Marek Paryz, Janusz Semrau, Pawel Stachura, and Marek Wilczynski. Represented here are some of the most widely-known stories, such as "My Kinsman, Major Molineux", "Wakefield", "Roger Malvin's Burial", "Ethan Brand", "The Great Stone Face", and some of the less widely-known ones, such as "Legends of the Province-House", "The Haunted Mind", "The Threefold Destiny", "Foot-prints on the Sea-shore". The individual essays discuss Hawthorne's texts in quasi-generic terms, through some persistent American themes and motifs, as well as for their aesthetic, philosophical, and existential meanings. The readings draw ideological and theoretical support from the thought of Emerson, Hegel, Trilling, de Certeau, Freud, Heidegger, Lacan, and Derrida.