To Kill a Mockingbird | The Mockingbird's Song

In the following excerpt, Claudia Durst Johnson explores the role of stories, art, and other forms of communication in Lee's novel.

The subject of To Kill a Mockingbird is also song, that is, expression reading and literacy; both overt and covert attempts at articulation; and communicative art forms, including the novel itself. The particulars of setting in the novel are children's books, grade school texts, many different local newspapers and national news magazines, law books, a hymnal, and the reading aloud of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. Much of the novel's action is actually reading, for as the locals and the children believe, that is Atticus Finch's...

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