Regendering the School Story: Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys

by Clark,Beverly Lyon

• ISBN13: 9780815321163
• ISBN10: 0815321163
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1996-08-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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 asensation story or, like Louisa May Alcott, they domesticated the boys school story, giving prominence to a female viewpoint.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Introduction	1	(28)
Redressing the School Story, Crossgendering a Genre
Part I. Before Tom Brown
Anxious Proxies and Independent Girls	29	(18)
Charles Lamb and Other Early Men
The First Tom Brown	47	(16)
Dorothy Kilner and Other Early Women
Telling Tales About Telling Tales	63	(24)
E. J. May and Other Talebearers
At Midcentury	87	(16)
Mary Martha Sherwood and Other Transitional Women
Part II. During the Heyday of the Canonical Story
Crossing Gender with Race	103	(28)
Edward Everett Hale and Other U.S. Writers
Crossing Gender with Ethnicity	131	(28)
Elizabeth Eiloart and Other British Writers
Sensationalizing the School Story	159	(16)
Ellen Wood
Domesticating the School Story	175	(22)
Louisa May Alcott
Engendering the School Story	197	(32)
Julia A. Mathews
Part III. In The Twentieth Century
Policing the Borders, Satirizing the State	229	(24)
H. G. Wells and Other Female Impersonators
Approaching High Seriousness	253	(22)
D. Wynne Willson and Other Recent Women
Works Cited	275	(18)
Author and Title Index	293