On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Alice Hall Petry. With a Foreword by William T. Going. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2007. Pp. xiv + 181. Cloth $ 36.00.

• Ingrid Thaler

Although Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird continues to be highly commercially successful not only in the US since its publication in 1960, it has not been widely received in literary and cultural criticism. The essay collection On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections thus points to a critical void which certainly demands attention. As the title indicates, the editor’s desire for “fresher topics” (xxxi) is informed by her interest in biographical criticism. The selection of critical angles can best be described as “eclectic” (xxxi) which is why it is difficult to establish links between the essays. Interspersed are personal reflections by three writers. John Carlos Rowe’s essay is an excellent reading of the novel’s (precapitalist) economy of gift, whose symbolic and social dimensions enable social change for the South rather than the failure of law. As a “literary anthropology of the Old and New South”(3), the novel manages to link the right to property in modern commodity culture to racism and other forms of social exclusion.

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