 | ||
Books To Kill a Mockingbird: Threateni, Understanding To Kill a Mockingb, Understanding the Scarlet Letter: A, Class Conflict in F Scott Fi, social impact of the novel Similar Nathaniel Hawthorne, F Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Arthur Miller | ||
Claudia Durst Johnson is a literary scholar best known for her work on the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, introducing the idea of the novel's gothicism and gothic satire. In the process of her research she befriended the author, Harper Lee. As a theater historian, she brought to light the scandalous “third tier” in 19th century American stage productions, an upper balcony in many theaters reserved exclusively for prostitutes.
Contents
She is a professor emeritus of English Literature at the University of Alabama, where she taught for two decades and served as chair of the English Department for twelve years until her retirement in 1996. She lives in Berkeley, California, where she continues to write, edit, and lecture.
Johnson, a native of North Carolina, earned a PhD in Literature at the University of Illinois in 1973. She is the author of nine books covering a wide range of subjects, including the influential To Kill a Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries (1994) and The Church and the Stage in the Nineteenth Century (2007).
Selected articles
“Hawthorne and Nineteenth-Century Perfectionism,” American Literature, December, 1972. Reprinted in On Hawthorne. The Best From American Literature, Duke Univ. Press, 1990. “Justification and ‘Young Goodman Brown," Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 974. “That Guilty Third Tier: Prostitution in the Nineteenth-Century in Victorian America, ed. Daniel Howe, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976. “The Obsession of Elbridge T. Gerry,” Nineteenth-Century Theatre Research, 1985. “Impotence and Omnipotence in The Scarlet Letter,” New England Quarterly, December, 1993. “Discord in Concord: Louisa May Alcott and Nathaniel Hawthorne,” in Hawthorne and the Women of His Day. University of Mass. Press,1999