Abstract
Whitt introduces a new way of understanding autobiography, personal essay, and memoir by focusing upon autobiographical novels such as Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), The Member of the Wedding (1946), and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). McCullers and Lee created mythopoetic universes in which Mick Kelly, Frankie Addams, and Scout Finch face adolescent challenges. Occasionally, their confusion provides moments of comic relief; most often, though, there is nothing amusing about a world in which girls are afraid, demeaned, ignored, manipulated, and ostracized. Did McCullers and Lee find solace in detaching themselves from their heroines, or did they confront their dislocation by creating characters in their own image? How much of their narratives directly reflect the time periods during which they themselves were learning about gender roles and sexuality? How much in their autobiographical novels is truth told “slant”?
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Whitt, J. (2016). Telling It “Slant”: Carson McCullers, Harper Lee, and the Veil of Memory. In: Graham-Bertolini, A., Kayser, C. (eds) Carson McCullers in the Twenty-First Century. American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40292-5_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40292-5_4
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