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Carregando... The English Girls' School Story: Subversion and Challenge in a Traditional Conservative Literary Genrede Judith Humphrey
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Girls school stories are dangerous; they change lives. So claims Judith Humphrey, who combines wry wit and rigorous scholarship in her wide-ranging exploration of the phenomenon of the English girls' school story and its continuing popularity with adult women. She argues convincingly that this seemingly innocuous and conformist genre bristles with subversive messages that normalise strong, proactive and intelligent women in a society that has preferred them to be quite otherwise. In this female world, women, framed by society as lacking and incomplete without men, quietly assume themselves to be whole and slip without question or contest into all positions of authority, even, as Dr Humphrey persuasively argues in the chapter on spirituality, that of the all powerful godhead. Replete with examples and quotations from the school stories themselves, this book, though academically challenging, is often funny. Crucially, it portrays a world in which girls and women are happy, loving and free a world that is still evolving in the Internet fan fiction that reworks its themes and recreates its community. Girls school stories have long been dismissed as formulaic third-rate literature. Judith Humphrey claims that, on the contrary, they are sites of empowerment, and this book explains their significance in the body of children's literature as well as their importance in the lives of many women. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Google Books — Carregando... GênerosClassificação decimal de Dewey (CDD)823.087209352342Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction By Type Genre fiction Adventure fiction Mystery fictionClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos E.U.A. (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
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I found The English Girls' School Story: Subversion and Challenge in a Traditional Conservative Literary Genre to be an excellent examination of its eponymous topic. I tracked it down for a paper I wrote in my masters course on two girls' school stories - one by Enid Blyton, the other by Dorita Fairlie Bruce - and I found it most useful. As mentioned, Judith Humphrey is building on previous scholarship here, particularly the work of Rosemary Auchmuty, but I liked the way in which she expanded some of Auchmuty's ideas, and the various lens - female friendship, female intellectual pursuits, female physical autonomy, female authority/divinity - she used to examined them. I also appreciated the fact that Humphrey drew in some earlier authors - in particular, late 19th / early 20th-century writer L.T. Meade - in her discussion, as Auchmuty's work focused almost exclusively on four popular 20th-century writers (Enid Blyton, Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, Dorita Fairlie Bruce, and Elsie J. Oxenham). Humphrey also discusses Bruce and Blyton in her book, which was quite useful to me, in writing my paper. If I had any criticism to make of the book, it would be the fact that it doesn't stretch back far enough, in its analysis of the genre, giving scant attention to the earlier examples of the girls' school story, which predate Meade. If Victorian school stories opened up subversive spaces for girl and women readers, how much more so would earlier works, such as Sarah Fielding's 1749 The Governess, or, The Little Female Academy, which is widely considered the first English-language novel written explicitly for children. Given that this genre, which Humphrey (rightly) considers so subversive, it tied to the dawn of children's fiction in general, in the English-speaking world, that might have been something to explore.
Leaving that issue aside - and I confess to some bias, as I have also done research on Fielding's book, and its influence on girls' educational narratives from 1750-1820 - this is an excellent work, and one I would particularly recommend to scholars interested in the British girls' school story specifically, or in British children's fiction for girls. It was published in 2009, so I'm not sure how accurate its portrayal of the current state of children's literature scholarship is - I suspect that girls' fiction is not derided like it once was, given the explosion of studies and work done in the field - but it is still a relevant and important work, as it concerns its analysis of its source material. ( )