Fun With Google Books

FYI, The Scarlet Letter is reproduced in its entirety at http://books.google.com – specifically here .  While this is not crazy helpful for the class since we all have books, it is fully searchable which means you can have some fun learning about Hawthorne’s language.  It can also be helpful for finding an exact passage you don’t know the chapter/page for.  It’s not perfect as the left side of the right page gets cut off some.

Some examples:

Religion – Puritan appears 17 times, Christian appears 8 times, God also appears 17 times, Satan gets 7 mentions, “black man” also gets 7 hits, the word Jesus never appears.

Sex – Bosom shows up a big 51 times, breast returns 37 results, but virgin only appears twice and sex thrice.  Talk about repressed.  Passion does a little better with 27 appearances.

Yay language.