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Girls' School Stories, 1749-1929 (Hardcover, New)
Loot Price: R32,079
Discovery Miles 320 790
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Girls' School Stories, 1749-1929 (Hardcover, New)
Series: History of Feminism
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Total price: R32,099
Discovery Miles: 320 990
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As part of the ongoing project of retrieving women writers from the
margins of literary and cultural history, scholars of literature,
history, and gender studies are increasingly exploring and
interrogating girls' print culture. School stories, in particular,
are generating substantial scholarly interest because of their
centrality to the history of girls' reading, their engagement with
cultural ideas about the education and socialization of girls, and
their enduring popularity with book collectors. However, while
serious scholars have begun to document the vast corpus of
English-language girls' school stories, few scholarly editions or
facsimile editions of these novels and short stories are readily
available. Girls' School Stories in English, 1749-1929, a new title
from Routledge and Edition Synapse's History of Feminism series,
provides a vital resource to cater to this growing critical
interest. This unique collection answers the important need to
balance the historical record of canonical literature for young
people in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century with
popular fictions that had wide, devoted, and-following the
emergence of school-series fiction-ongoing readerships. Moreover,
existing scholarship has not yet explicated the connections between
the British genre and its adaptation to colonial and American
readerships, and one of the functions of this collection is to
document the evolution of the girls' school-story genre in Britain
to pinpoint the development and contestation of its signature
tropes, and to trace the refinement and reproduction of these
elements in Canadian, Australian, and American print cultures. The
six volumes in the collection cover the years 1749 to 1929, a
temporal span designed to demonstrate the origins of the genre and
its development throughout the Victorian and Edwardian eras. It
concludes with works from the 1920s that coincide with a peak in
the genre's popularity. And the thematic, rather than
chronological, organization of the set allows users easily to
compare and contrast (across time and place) school-story
conventions and attitudes with issues such as women's higher
education. Volume I ('Moral Education') of the set draws attention
to some of the earliest school stories published for girls in the
eighteenth century, many of which situated moral improvement and
rationality as the primary purpose of girls' education. Early
stories, such as Dorothy Kilner's Anecdotes of a Boarding School;
or, An Antidote to the Vices of those Establishments (1790), which
is reproduced in full, were especially influenced by religious
imperatives. While the overtly religious nature of these texts
declined throughout the nineteenth century, the girls' school story
continued to present a strong moral code based on honour and
selflessness, which is shown in an excerpt from Canadian Ethel Hume
Bennett's novel, Judy of York Hill (1922). The girls' school story
is typically one of transformation, in which the protagonist learns
to conform to the rules and codes of school life. Volume II ('The
New Girl'), therefore, focuses on the generic conventions
associated with a new student arriving at school, in which the girl
does not initially understand or comply with the expectations of
teachers and peers. While it presents examples that adhere to the
model of successful transformation, this volume also reproduces
some striking instances where this trope is subverted. It includes
the full text of noted school-story author L. T. Meade's Wild Kitty
(1897), which depicts a 'wild Irish girl' protagonist who is unable
to be tamed by the English school environment, as well as a story
from the Australasian Girls' Annual, 'Vic and the Refugee' (1916),
in which the new girl is revealed to be a spy. Volume III ('Unruly
Femininity') concentrates on girls who are disobedient, impulsive,
or who are fun-loving 'madcaps'. It contains the full texts of Mary
Hughes' The Rebellious Schoolgirl (1821), which is distinctive as
one of the first sympathetic portrayals of a girl who has yet to
understand and abide by the rules of the school, and Evelyn Sharp's
The Making of a Schoolgirl (1897), which complicates some of the
school-story tropes. Nonetheless, many of these school stories are
heavily invested in defining a feminine ideal, as we see in a later
short story, 'Teddy Versus Theodora' (1910). In addition to
defining a feminine ideal, many schoolgirl heroines take their
family and school responsibilities seriously, as markers of their
desire to be good and to succeed academically. Volume IV ('Duty and
Responsibility') demonstrates the ways in which girl heroines can
have different expectations and attitudes towards their families,
their studies, and their friends. The novel that is reproduced in
full in this volume, Elsie Jeanette Oxenham's The Abbey Girls
(1920), is the foundational text produced by one of the most
popular writers of girls' school stories and was the basis for
dozens of further books. It emphasizes the rewards that issue from
sacrifice, with the heroine passing up a scholarship to allow her
cousin to attend school, only to receive an inheritance at the
novel's closure that allows her also to enrol at the school. A
girl's responsibility to her country is particularly evident in an
excerpt from Angela Brazil's The Patriotic Schoolgirl (1918), in
which the students are encouraged to consider how they can help
national war efforts. The formation of friendships and the
pleasures of school life, such as sports and games, become
hallmarks of the genre from the late nineteenth century. Volume V
('Friendships and Fun') exemplifies the enjoyable aspects of
schoolgirl life that some protagonists metafictively describe
reading about in school stories, but also provides examples of the
way that relationships among girls can be infused with jealousy or
hostility, such as in the excerpt from the 1874 Little Pansy: A
Story of the School Life of a Minister's Orphan Daughter. Louise
Mack's Teens: A Story of Australian Schoolgirls (1897), which is
reproduced in full, is regarded as the first Australian school
novel and focuses on the development, and testing, of a strong
friendship between high-school girls Lennie and Mabel. The
collection's final volume ( 'Higher Education and Women's Rights')
demonstrates how the genre presented debates about women's suffrage
and higher education to a girl readership. The college story
replicated many school-story conventions, but also grappled with
questions of family and public opposition to university education
for women. This volume includes the complete novel, An American
Girl, and Her Four Years in a Boys' College (1878) by Olive San
Louie Anderson, a member of the first class of female students at
the University of Michigan. As the genre was more prominent in the
United States, two American college short stories are also
reproduced, as well as extracts from a British example, L. T.
Meade's A Sweet Girl Graduate (1891). School stories by their
nature were largely supportive of girls' education but,
nevertheless, in some of the extracts selected for this volume,
they show ambivalence about issues such as women's suffrage. By
making readily available materials which are currently very
difficult for scholars, researchers, and students across the globe
to locate and use, Girls' School Stories in English, 1749-1929 is a
veritable treasure-trove. The gathered works are reproduced in
facsimile, giving users a strong sense of immediacy to the texts
and permitting citation to the original pagination. Each volume is
also supplemented by substantial introductions, newly written by
the editors, which contextualize the material. And with a detailed
appendix providing data on the provenance of the gathered works,
the collection is destined to be welcomed as a vital reference and
research resource.
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