Editors' Comment

EDITORS' COMMENT This collection of essays had its origin and takes its title from the biannual summer meeting ofthe Nathaniel Hawthorne Society held in Boston in June of 2000. Organized by Hawthorne Society President-elect Millicent Bell to commemorate the sesquicentennial anniversary of The ScarletLetter's publication on March 16, 1850, the conference featured papers by more than eighty Hawthorne scholars, including six ofour contributors (Michael Winship, Bryce Traister, Teresa Goddu, Leland Person, Michael Gilmore, and Walter Herbert). Our other two contributors, Lesley Ginsberg and Ellen Weinauer, presented papers at a Hawthorne Society session that Teresa Goddu organized for the American Literature Association annual meeting in Long Beach, California, just prior to the Boston conference. Representing a range ofcritical issues and approaches, these eight essays also reflect the increasing efforts ofHawthorne scholars to situate The Scarlet Letter within nineteenth-century conversations about many cultural issues and practices: copyright law and bookselling, childrearing, motherhood, slavery, and women's property rights, as well as the rise of bureaucracies, pornography, and the publicity industry. Given its persistent popularity over the 150 years since its initial publication , The Scarlet Letter has undoubtedly borne many of the "modern burdens ," in the words of Michael Gilmore's closing essay in this volume, that readers bring to literary texts. The coincidence of publishing this sesquicentennial collection in the first year ofthe twenty-first century leads us to speculate and hope that, one hundred years from now in 2 101 , a similar volume will appear to commemorate the 250th anniversary of The Scarlet Letter's publication . "On a field, sable, the letter A, gules." Teresa A. Goddu and Leland S. Person ...