Mockingbird Grows Up: Re-Reading Harper Lee Since Watchman - Hardcover

Michele Reutter (editor) & Jonathan S. Cullick (editor)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1621905462 ISBN 13: 9781621905462

Publisher: The University of Tennessee Press, 2020

Synopsis

Although Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird has attracted a great deal of scholarly and popular attention due to its engaging narrative and broad appeal to a sense of justice, little has been done to examine the modern classic through the lens of Lee's controversial novel Go Set a Watchman, published unexpectedly a year before the author's death.

In Mockingbird Grows Up Cheli Reutter and Jonathan S. Cullick assemble a team of scholars to take on the task of interpreting, contextualising, and deconstructing To Kill a Mockingbird in the wake of Go Set a Watchman. The essays contained in this groundbreaking volume cover a range of literary topics, such as race, sexuality, language, and reading contexts. Critically, the volume revisits the question of African-American characterisation in Lee's work and reexamines the development of Atticus Finch, a character long believed to be an exemplar of justice and virtue in Lee's fiction. The editors also take on questions regarding the publication of Go Set a Watchman, and Holly Blackford contributes an essay that places Watchman within the pantheon of American literature.

Literary scholars, educators, and those interested in southern literature will appreciate the new light this publication sheds on a classic American novel. Mockingbird Grows Up offers a deeper understanding of a canonical American work and prepares a new generation to engage with Harper Lee's appealing prose, complex characters, and influential metaphors.

About this title

About the Author

Cheli Reutter is an associate professor of English at the University of Cincinnati and an affiliate faculty member of the university's Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her journal articles have appeared in Paper's on Language and Literature, CEA Critic, Journal of the Society for Multi-Ethnic Literature, and others. She is co-editor of Crisscrossing Borders in Literature of the American West.

Jonathan S. Cullick is professor of English at Northern Kentucky University. He is the author of Making History: Biographical Narratives of Robert Penn Warren and Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men: A Reader's Companion.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of Tennessee Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1621905462
• ISBN 13: 9781621905462
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 277