At first the circumstances surrounding the alleged rape of Mayella Ewell, the daughter of a drunk and violent white farmer, barely penetrate the children's consciousness. She, her brother, and Dill Harris, a boy who spends the summers with his aunt in Maycomb, while away the hours reenacting scenes from Dracula and plotting ways to get a peek at the town bogeyman, Boo Radley. Like the slow-moving occupants of her fictional town, Lee takes her time getting to the heart of her tale we first meet the Finches the summer before Scout's first year at school.
The result is a tough and tender novel of race, class, justice, and the pain of growing up. Though her story explores big themes, Harper Lee chooses to tell it through the eyes of a child. Set in the small Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird follows three years in the life of 8-year-old Scout Finch, her brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus-three years punctuated by the arrest and eventual trial of a young black man accused of raping a white woman. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out." I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. He has also received the International Prize of Catalonia, the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico, and the Hans Christian Andersen Bicentennial Prize of Denmark."When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. In 1999, Professor Bloom received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism. In addition, he is the author of hundreds of articles, reviews, and editorial introductions. His most recent books include How to Read and Why (2000), G enius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002), Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003), Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (2004), and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005). The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sets forth Professor Bloom's provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great writers and their predecessors. Educated at Cornell and Yale universities, he is the author of 30 books, including Shelley's Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961), Blake's Apocalypse (1963), Yeats (1970), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (1982), The American Religion (1992), The Western Canon (1994), Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996), and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), a 1998 National Book Award finalist. Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University.
0 kommentar(er)
