On the Change of Atticus Finch’s Characterizaton -From To Kill a Mockingbird to Go Set a Watchman 阿提克斯芬奇形象转变之研究——从《杀死一只知更鸟》到《设立守望者》文献综述

 2021-10-23 21:40:52

毕业论文课题相关文献综述

On the Change of Atticus Finchs CharacterizationFrom To Kill a Mockingbird to Go Set a Watchman阿提克斯芬奇形象转变之研究从 《杀死一只知更鸟》到《设立守望者》1. IntroductionIn this section, relevant information of the research topic is introduced, including the author, the two novels covered, and the character of Atticus Finch.1.1 About Harper LeeHarper Lee (1926-2016) is a modern American writer, the winner of the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was awarded Presidential Medal of freedom in 2007. Lee was born and grew up in Monroeville, Alabama. Her father, a lawyer, also ran a local newspaper. Her mother suffered from mental illness and oftentimes stayed inside from others. After leaving college without earning a degree, Lee moved to New York in the 1950s, took a job as an airline reservations clerk, and wrote her first novel during that time. Though she gained great fame after the success of To Kill a Mockingbird, she rarely granted interviews and only spoke through her literary agents. Unmarried for her whole life, she passed away in her hometown on February 19, 2016.1.2 About To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a WatchmanTo Kill a Mockingbird, written by Harper Lee was published in 1960, which was then proved to be an immediate success and won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The story of Mockingbird takes place between 1933 and 1935 in a fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, where a young colored man, Tom Robinson is accused of raping a white lady, and Atticus Finch is appointed to defend him. Atticus figures it out that the accusers, Mayella and her father Bob Ewell are lying. Despite Toms innocence is demonstrated, the jury convicts him, and Tom is shot dead while desperately trying to escape from prison. Following his humiliation at the trail, Bob Ewell attempts to take vengeance against Finch by attacking his two children, but is in turn fatally stabbed by Boo Radley, a mysterious neighbor of the Finches. The story is told by Atticuss daughter, Jean Louise Finch (Scout) in first person perspective narration. During the 2 years, Scout has matured a lot and learned much about poverty, racism, injustice, and class divisions from her experience.Go Set a Watchman, the sequel to Mockingbird is Lees second and last novel, was not published until 2015, more than half a century after the publishing of Mockingbird. It describes a story that happens in 1953. Jean Louise Finch, 26, returns to her hometown Maycomb from New York, only to find her family and friends have changed a lot. During her stay, she is horrified by discovering his father who bravely defends a black man falsely accused in Mockingbird sternly opposes against empowering the blacks in Maycomb with full civil right (Iannone, 2016:240). At the end of the story, Jean Louise finally welcomes Atticus silently to the human race (Lee, 2015:278). The story is written in third person perspective narration through the observation of Jean Louise. Watchman is also accepted as the first draft of Mockingbird, though it is set two decades after and was not published until half a century later. 1.3 About Atticus FinchAtticus is one the important characters in both Mockingbird and Watchman. He is described as a benevolent father, upright lawyer and iconic voice of reason in Mockingbird. After the publication of Mockingbird and the broadcast of its namesake movie, Atticus soon became a famous and welcomed image in the United States. His features of integrity, rationality and humanity have influenced generations of readers. However, the classic image was shaken after the publication of Watchman, in which the older Atticus becomes a stubborn segregationist, confusing both readers and his daughter, Jean Louise. The 72-year-old Atticus is involved in a group that promote White Supremacy, and defends the grandson of Calpurnia but only to avoid the interference of NAACP. Against the younger one who insists that all men are born equal and that its a sin to kill a mockingbird,the characterization of the older Atticus in Watchman is highly controversial.2. Literature ReviewPublished in 1960, the Pulitzer Prize winner To Kill a Mockingbird has gain great reputation and fame for over half a century. As a widely read and influential work in American literature, it has caused huge social effects and wide academic responses. Overshadowed by the great success of Mockingbird and marked as its de facto manuscript, Go Set a Watchman is still regarded as a brilliant and compelling novel by critics.2.1 Researches on the classic image of Atticus FinchAtticus Finch is one of the most important characters in both two novels. As an upright lawyer and benevolent father in Mockingbird, Atticus is usually viewed as a man of integrity.He is a father and lawyer of positive energy, who demands his children should learn to understand and respect others as a father and seeks truth as a lawyer (Feng, 2018:60). In Mockingbird, Atticus is doubted and sneered at as a nigger-lover by the white natives due to his defense for an innocent black people in the court. In that way, in study of the characterization of Atticus in Mockingbird, Failinger (1993-1994:303) concluded that Atticus is a hero on his lonely path.2.2 Researches on the change of Atticus Nevertheless, the publication of Go Set a Watchman in 2015 arouse great controversy to Atticuss characterization. Readers are shocked by its depiction of Atticus Finch, for the wise and patient white lawyer who is a model of heroism and enlightenment in Mockingbird is found espousing segregationist views and forces us to consider and reconsider the classic status in Mockingbird (Iannone, 2016:240, 243). Because of the short period after the publication of Watchman, there are but scarce works on it, among which scholars have tried to understand and explain the abrupt change from different perspectives. Some scholars take the change as a sort of disillusion. In 2015, Maureen Corrigan stated outright that Watchman is a Mess that makes us reconsider a masterpiece. Domestic authors Li and Xu argued that the image of a white Messiah shaped in Mockingbird is broken in Watchman, and thus allows readers to see a more vivid social background, visualizing the conflicts and tangles in the storm of segregation. The Atticuss classic characterization collapsed, so did his heroic image that have lasted for 5 decades in readers mind. Thats why many people tend to believe the story of Watchman happens in a parallel world. (Li Xu, 2016). And many critics also pointed it out that reading Watchman is like swallowing harsh medicine, as this book is a better and more precise reflection of the time when Lee was writing. The rewrite itself represents the complexity of racial problems in the United States and brings the American readers with deep influence as well (Jiang, 2016:111). In an earlier investigation, Iannone asked his interviewees 4 questions about Lees works. In the last question, he required them to consider what effect Go Set a Watchman would put on the status of Lee and her first novel. Among the answers, Mark Bauerlein believes that the plot of trail in Mockingbird makes for good melodrama but bad history while Watchman is the opposite; Mary Grabar held the view that the dilemma in Watchman is eliminated by the change of time frame as well as the age the storyteller; Donald M. Hassler stated that Watchman is more like an essay, which aims to present solid exposition on the General Principles that were the foundation of the Old South; Peter Augustine Lawler took Atticus as a combination of virtues and vices and a model of democratized aristocrat in the mode of Thomas Jefferson (Iannone, 2016).The New Historicism was developed in the United States in the early 1980s, and was soon be adopted in the study of British Renaissance and early modern literature, becoming one of the major movements in American literature research. It is against isolating the aesthetic form from the material world, and view art and history as two realms that intertwined but not disjoint. The New Historicists hold the view that literature is a production of society and in turn literature exerts significant impacts on society (Zhu, 2015). And studying one period in history for the sake of studying literature of that period is not enough, because it may finally come to a dead end. New Historicism should cross the periods like the process of the history (Liu, 1989:757). A truly historical understanding is one that based not on the knowledge of particular events but on the ability to generalize about continuity and change, to identify the shape of temporal movement and the facilitating conditions for that shape (Dimock, 1991:621). Ma studied the image of Atticus in the book Mockingbird, its namesake movie and the book Watchman from the perspective of the New Historicism. In the research, Watchman is examined as a self-fashioning work. According to the author, Atticus ended up as a segregationist in Watchman from a gentle lawyer and anti-racist hero in Mockingbird, and the shift of Atticus reveals the how events in history and cultural background interact with human conscious through works of art (Ma, 2017).2.3 Research GapsThough the laborious work of former researchers is of great values, a gap does exist between former and present researches. When analyzing Atticuss characterization, existing studies mainly focus on one book or view the two books separately. More over, some researchers are preoccupied with the cognition that Watchman is a failure compared with Mockingbird, resulting its being replaced by Mockingbird in the 1950s and the delay of publication for more than 5 decades. What the former researchers failed to see is that Watchman shares the same cultural and character settings with Mockingbird, and theres natural consistency between the two novels. It is also a complementary work of Mockingbird in plots. Though the main thread of Watchman describes 3 days of Jean Louises stay at home when shes 26, the book informs readers the contents concerned with Jean Louises childhood and adolescence through reminiscence and dialogue, filling the vacuum in plot between the timings of Mockingbird and Watchman and linking the two works together instead of denying the consistency. Therefore, an assumption is made in this thesis that Watchman in fact does not twist Atticuss characterization, but enrich it. And the key of the thesis is to critically analyze the change of his characterization and the reason on the ground of the assumption.ConclusionWe expect to see that the degeneration of Atticus Finch in fact reflects the surged prejudice against colored people in Southern United States in certain ages, exposing the appeal of common Dixies and the inherent conflicts between them and the Yankees, between the southern states and federal authority. Atticus is a guardian of justice, but limited one. He can protect the colored when they are weak and vulnerable; but when they are strong enough to gather up and fight for equal rights, he cannot tolerate the rules that have been set for generations being changed by them. As a state senator, Atticus should know and does know what his fellowmen need to serve the them. Having compared the time frame of the two novels, an inference can be made that the Atticuss prejudice may has long existed in Mockingbird, nevertheless its covered by other heated crises and is hard to be detected by a 6-year-girl. And that girl, who we would like to call an idealist, is too well protected by her widowed father when she is young, and by an inclusive city after leaving home; and she doesnt exactly know the place she has been living until she returns at a subtle time. Neither Atticus and Maycomb County have changed, but both Jean Louise Finch and the readers are too fragile to accept the cruelty. The Mockingbird is more like a fairy tale for children, in which the hero is pure and perfect, while the Watchman is closer to the reality, where people are a creature of paradox.

以上是毕业论文文献综述，课题毕业论文、任务书、外文翻译、程序设计、图纸设计等资料可联系客服协助查找。

您可能感兴趣的文章