Mockingbird Grows Up

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.