From June through August (each month serving as a chapter), Angie meets and dates Jack, experiences newfound social popularity because of her tie to him, almost loses both Jack and her social status when she briefly dates a “fast” boy, and ends the novel somewhat ambiguously by accepting Jack’s ring-but not putting it on-and leaving Fond du Lac to start college in Chicago.
It is set in a lush, seemingly timeless Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, during Angie’s final summer before college.
The novel tells the story of seventeen-year-old Angie Morrow’s relationship with Jack Duluth. I ultimately suggest that the men’s tone and focus on Seventeenth Summer evinces a dissat isfaction with wartime masculinity that the critics’ simple categorization of the book as a “girls’ junior novel” cannot incorporate. This essay thus pinpoints the moment when Seventeenth Sum mer became age-graded and gendered as a “girls’” text, then investigates how the letter writers both uphold and challenge such categorization. Reading these letters against the reviews and analyses of the day allows us to recognize how professional criticism and the institutions supporting it construct readership, while at the same time questioning how readers create meaning in ways that go beyond that criticism.
0 kommentar(er)
