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To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee published in 1960 is still considered to be one of the most effective criticisms of racial prejudice depicting Atticus Finch as an example of a righteous person. However, the subsequent Go Set a Watchman (2015) has a different Atticus who seems to have changed his stand on race issues. This research employs Lucien Goldmann’s genetic structuralism with comparative analysis to trace the development of Atticus Finch’s approach to racism in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and Go Set a Watchman (2015). This research examines the major social changes in the mid-20th century American South through Atticus' transformation from a hero for racial justice to a segregationist and racist. It explores how social pressures and personal struggles influence people's beliefs. This research further examines Jean Louise Finch's disenchantment with her father's changing views on race that portrays the generational and moral conflicts triggered by social transformation. The findings of this research are anticipated to offer profound understanding of how literature can mirror societal changes and offer valuable prescription for how the relation between history and literature can be understood.

How often does a novel earn its author both the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to Harper Lee by George W. Bush in 2007, and a spot on a list of “100 best gay and lesbian novels”? Clearly, To Kill a Mockingbird , Lee’s Pulitzer Prize–winning tale of race relations and coming of age in Depression-era Alabama, means many different things to many different people. In Mockingbird Passing , Holly Blackford invites the reader to view Lee’s beloved novel in parallel with works by other iconic American writers—from Emerson, Whitman, Stowe, and Twain to James, Wharton, McCullers, Capote, and others. In the process, she locates the book amid contesting literary traditions while simultaneously exploring the rich ambiguities that define its characters. Blackford finds the basis of Mockingbird’s broad appeal in its ability to embody the mainstream culture of romantics like Emerson and social reform writers like Stowe, even as alternative canons—southern gothic, deadpan humor, queer literatures, regional women’s novels—lurk in its subtexts. Central to her argument is the notion of “passing”: establishing an identity that conceals the inner self so that one can function within a closed social order. For example, the novel’s narrator, Scout, must suppress her natural tomboyishness to become a “lady.” Meanwhile, Scout’s father, Atticus Finch, must contend with competing demands of thoughtfulness, self-reliance, and masculinity that ultimately stunt his effectiveness within an unjust society. Blackford charts the identity dilemmas of other key characters—the mysterious Boo Radley, the young outsider Dill (modeled on Lee’s lifelong friend Truman Capote), the oppressed victim Tom Robinson— in similarly intriguing ways. Queer characters cannot pass unless, like the narrator, Miss Maudie, and Cal, they split into the “modest double life.” In uncovering To Kill a Mockingbird ’s lively conversation with a diversity of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers and tracing the equally diverse journeys of its characters, Blackford offers a myriad of fresh insights into why the novel has retained its appeal for so many readers for over fifty years. At once Victorian, modern, and postmodern, Mockingbird passes in many canons.

Fifty years after the release of the film version of Harper Lee’s acclaimed novel To Kill a Mockingbird, this collection of original essays takes a fresh look at a classic text in legal scholarship. The contributors revisit and examine Atticus, Scout, and Jem Finch, their community, and the events that occur there through the interdisciplinary lens of law and humanities scholarship. The readings in this volume peel back the film’s visual representation of the manylayered social world of Maycomb, Alabama, offering sometimes counterintuitive insights through the prism of a number of provocative contemporary theoretical and interpretive questions. What, they ask, is the relationship between the subversion of social norms and the doing of justice or injustice? Through what narrative and visual devices are some social hierarchies destabilized while others remain hegemonic? How should we understand the sacrifices characters make in the name of justice, and comprehend their failures in achieving it? Asking such questions casts light on the film’s eccentricities and internal contradictions and suggests the possibility of new interpretations of a culturally iconic text. The book examines the context that gave meaning to the film’s representation of race and how debates about family, community, and race are played out and reframed in law. Contributors include Colin Dayan, Thomas L. Dumm, Susan Sage Heinzelman, Linda Ross Meyer, Naomi Mezey, Imani Perry, and Ravit Reichman.

I distinguish between two senses in which feminists have argued that the knower is social: 1. situated or socially positioned and 2. interdependent. I argue that these two aspects of the knower work in cooperation with each other in a way that can produce willful hermeneutical ignorance, a type of epistemic injustice absent from Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice. Analyzing the limitations of Fricker's analysis of the trial of Tom Robinson in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird with attention to the way in which situatedness and interdependence work in tandem, I develop an understanding of willful hermeneutical ignorance, which occurs when dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally. Such refusals allow dominantly situated knowers to misunderstand, misinterpret, and/or ignore whole parts of the world.

Through cryptonymy, the phantom, as explained by Esther Rashkin’s theory for psychoanalytic analysis, is revealed. Symbols and silences for three first-person protagonists in four contemporary American novels are analyzed. Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” Scout or Jean Louise Finch in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Go Set a Watchman,” and Theresa in Alice McDermott’s “Child of My Heart” reveal their unresolved grief caused by trauma or loss of a loved one. Characters reveal their conflicted identities, their clash with family and cultural norms, and their consequent fallout from society, or ambivalence to it. Discourse and symbols in a text tangential to the movement of the plot reveal encrypted elements of the truth, often a deep family secret. Storytelling though in each story allows for hope that the narrator or protagonist heals.

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, published sixty years ago, was voted \"best-loved novel\" in PBS's The Great American Read poll in 2018. Recently the book has undergone much-needed scrutiny about how it deals with issues of prejudice. In an NCTE blog post, Julia Franks writes, \"I've been trying to pull To Kill a Mockingbird from the curriculum for decades . . . because the messages about race and the status quo are so very outdated.\" So why choose to read it in a high school classroom? For the last fourteen years, they have taught To Kill a Mockingbird in a variety of ways: as a text students read to answer quiz questions; through the theme of coming of age; and by centering Lee's craft as she breathes life into the town of Maycomb. None of these approaches felt like they were doing the novel, or their students, justice because Lee doesn't breathe life into all her characters. It occurred to them that they were trying to teach the novel the way they wanted it to be, rather than calling attention to and discussing its shortcomings.

From the author of the bestselling memoir, The History of Swimming, comes a novel about Truman Capote, Harper Lee, and the ghosts of the Clutters, the Kansas farm family murdered fifty years ago, in cold blood. Kim Powers imagines the truths Capote and Lee uncovered in Kansas and kept hidden for years; the rumors and revelations that followed the success of To Kill a Mockingbird, which estranged the former friends; and the confessions Capote makes in his final months that ultimately reunite them. The ghosts of the Clutters also appear, seeking resolution and revenge. What secrets from that tragic night do the family members confess? With Capote in Kansas, Kim Powers looks at one of the greatest literary mysteries of the twentieth century and creates a haunting tale of what might have been.

Racial discrimination is one of the public problems that emerges in multicultural countries. The aim of the current research is to study racial discrimination in Doris Lessing's The Grass Is Singing and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. The process of analysis is confined to the analysis of the racial practices exercised by white people against black people in both novels. The research method is descriptive, analytical, and quantitative using a content analysis approach. The findings show that there is a similarity between the two established systems of racism: the system of racism in Africa, and the racial system in America. Some established rules and principles are to be respected in order to keep the white supremacy hegemonic. On the other hand, in The Grass Is Singing, Lessing portrays black people as criminals and rapists, who have to be punished for their crimes. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee describes black people as victims of crimes they have never committed. Moreover, the offensive racial words in To Kill a Mockingbird outnumber the offensive racial words in The Grass Is Singing. It can be said that the blacks are seen as victims of racial discrimination and racial stereotypes in both novels.

This study aimed to describe the reflection of humanity amidst the racist behaviour in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. This study employed a qualitative method using Stephen Greenblatt's New Historicism approach. The data of this study was collected from the descriptions and utterances of the characters and narrator in the novel. The result of this study shows how discrimination was treated at that time, how a sense of humanity existed to defend black people from racial discrimination by white people, and also how this discriminatory treatment influenced social conditions in that era, where white people who supported black people would receive the same treatment as black people.