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Full-Text Articles in Literature in English, North America
Bildungsroman And Trauma In Harper Lee’S To Kill A Mockingbird And Dorothy Allison’S Bastard Out Of Carolina, Bernadette D'Auria
Bildungsroman And Trauma In Harper Lee’S To Kill A Mockingbird And Dorothy Allison’S Bastard Out Of Carolina, Bernadette D'Auria
Student Research Submissions
Scholars have long viewed Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird as a young girl’s Bildungsroman. Through an adult Scout’s reflection on her childhood, Lee takes her readers on a journey that has traditionally been categorized as a young girl’s growth from naivete to maturity. While Scout is witness to the impacts and traumas of racism in Maycomb, scholars have often overlooked Scout’s ambivalent attitude regarding these events. Scout sentimentalizes Maycomb and rarely processes or reacts to the traumatic events that encompass her childhood, leaving Lee’s narrative a poor example of a growth towards maturity. In contrast, the coming-of-age arc in …
Little Women, Little Houses: Authorship And Authority In Louisa May Alcott And Laura Ingalls Wilder, Katia Savelyeva
Little Women, Little Houses: Authorship And Authority In Louisa May Alcott And Laura Ingalls Wilder, Katia Savelyeva
Student Research Submissions
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House novels, share a place in the canon of American children’s literature as novels centered on female protagonists coming of age within an emblematic period in American history, respectively the duration and aftermath of the Civil War and the post-Homestead Act settlement of the Western frontier. Each text portrays the intertwined processes of girlhood and nationhood through the eyes of rebellious, gender-nonconforming protagonists, Jo and Laura, who each undergo an arc towards starting a traditional family and immersing themselves in normative national projects (respectively a philanthropic school for the poor, …