When boarding-school fiction became popular in the 19th century, it tended to be warm and nostalgic, filled with sporting events, practical jokes, and schemes to get even with campus bullies. All of that changed in the era discussed in this book. Holden Caulfield, the narrator of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, drops out of one prep school and is expelled from two others. The conflicts between students in John Knowles's Devon School novels become so heated that two young men die. And in the controversial novel Good Times/Bad Times, James Kirkwood portrays the headmaster of a private...
When boarding-school fiction became popular in the 19th century, it tended to be warm and nostalgic, filled with sporting events, practical jokes, and...
American Boarding School Fiction, 1981–2021: Inclusion and Scandal is a study of contemporary American boarding-school narratives. Before the 1980s, writers of American boarding-school fiction tended to concentrate on mournful teenagers – the center was filled with students: white, male, Protestant students at boys’ schools. More recently, a new generation of writers–including Richard A. Hawley, Anita Shreve, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Tobias Wolff–has transformed school fiction by highlighting issues relating to gender, race, scandal, sexuality, education, and social class in...
American Boarding School Fiction, 1981–2021: Inclusion and Scandal is a study of contemporary American boarding-school narratives. Before the 1980s,...
