1st Edition

Regendering the School Story Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys

By Beverly Lyon Clark Copyright 1996
    306 Pages
    by Routledge

    306 Pages
    by Routledge

    In 18th through 20th-century British and American literature, school stories always play out the power relationships between adult and child. They also play out gender relationships, especially when females are excluded, although most histories of the genre ignore the unusual novels that probe the gendering of school stories. When the occasional man wrote about girls schools-as Charles Lamb and H. G. Wells did-he sometimes empowered his female characters, granting them freedoms that he had experienced at school.
    Women who wrote about boys' schools often gave unusual emphasis to families, and at times, revealed the contradictions in the schoolyard code against telling tales or presented competing versions of masculinity, such as the Christian gentleman versus the self-made man. Sometimes these middle-class white women projected their sense of estrangement onto working class and minority women. Sometimes they wrote school stories that were in dialog with other genres, as when Mrs. Henry Wood wrote a sensation story or, like Louisa May Alcott, they domesticated the boys school story, giving prominence to a female viewpoint.

    Chapter 1 Introduction; Part 1 Before Tom Brown; Chapter 2 Anxious Proxies and Independent Girls, Charles Lamb; Chapter 3 The First Tom Brown, DorothyKilner; Chapter 4 Telling Tales about Telling Tales, E. J.May; Chapter 5 At Midcentury, Mary MarthaSherwood; Part 2 During the Heyday of the Canonical Story; Chapter 6 Crossing Gender with Race, Edward Everett Hale; Chapter 7 Crossing Gender with Ethnicity, Elizabeth Eiloart; Chapter 8 Sensationalizing the School Story, Ellen Wood; Chapter 9 Domesticating the School Story, Louisa May Alcott; Chapter 10 Engendering the School Story, Julia A. Mathews; Part 3 In the Twentieth Century; Chapter 11 Policing the Borders, Satirizing the State, H. G. Wells; Chapter 12 Approaching High Seriousness, D. Wynne Willson;

    Biography

    Beverly Lyon Clark

    "An important addition to children's literature criticism and should be acquired by all libraries collecting in that area." -- Choice