Public School Literature, Civic Education and the Politics of Male Adolescence

Public School Literature, Civic Education and the Politics of Male Adolescence PDF Author: Jenny Holt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351907662
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British society gradually began to see 'adolescence' as a distinct social entity worthy of concentrated study and debate. Jenny Holt argues that the social construction of the public schoolboy, a figure made ubiquitous by a huge body of fictional, biographical, and journalistic work, had a disproportionate role to play in the development of social perceptions of adolescence and in forming ideas of how young people should be educated to become citizens in an age of increasing democracy. With attention to an admirably wide range of popular books as well as examples from the periodical press, Jenny Holt begins with a discussion of the ideas of late-eighteenth-century social radicals, and ends with the First World War, when the more 'serious' public school literature, which sought to involve juvenile readers in complex social and political issues, declined suddenly in popularity. Along the way, Jenny Holt considers the influence of Victorian Evangelical thought, Social Darwinism, and the early-twentieth-century National Efficiency movement on concepts of adolescence. Whether it is shedding new light on well-known texts by Thomas Hughes and Rudyard Kipling, providing a fascinating discussion of works written by boys themselves, or supplying historical context for the development of the concept of adolescence, this book will engage not only scholars of childhood and children's literature but Victorianists and those interested in the history of educational practice.

Public School Literature, Civic Education and the Politics of Male Adolescence

Public School Literature, Civic Education and the Politics of Male Adolescence PDF Author: Jenny Holt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351907662
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British society gradually began to see 'adolescence' as a distinct social entity worthy of concentrated study and debate. Jenny Holt argues that the social construction of the public schoolboy, a figure made ubiquitous by a huge body of fictional, biographical, and journalistic work, had a disproportionate role to play in the development of social perceptions of adolescence and in forming ideas of how young people should be educated to become citizens in an age of increasing democracy. With attention to an admirably wide range of popular books as well as examples from the periodical press, Jenny Holt begins with a discussion of the ideas of late-eighteenth-century social radicals, and ends with the First World War, when the more 'serious' public school literature, which sought to involve juvenile readers in complex social and political issues, declined suddenly in popularity. Along the way, Jenny Holt considers the influence of Victorian Evangelical thought, Social Darwinism, and the early-twentieth-century National Efficiency movement on concepts of adolescence. Whether it is shedding new light on well-known texts by Thomas Hughes and Rudyard Kipling, providing a fascinating discussion of works written by boys themselves, or supplying historical context for the development of the concept of adolescence, this book will engage not only scholars of childhood and children's literature but Victorianists and those interested in the history of educational practice.

The Politics of 1930s British Literature

The Politics of 1930s British Literature PDF Author: Natasha Periyan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350019852
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Winner of the 2018 International Standing Conference for the History of Education's First Book Award Drawing on a rich array of archival sources and historical detail, The Politics of 1930s British Literature tells the story of a school-minded decade and illuminates new readings of the politics and aesthetics of 1930s literature. In a period of shifting political claims, educational policy shaped writers' social and gender ideals. This book explores how a wide array of writers including Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Winifred Holtby and Graham Greene were informed by their pedagogic work. It considers the ways in which education influenced writers' analysis of literary style and their conception of future literary forms. The Politics of 1930s British Literature argues that to those perennial symbols of the 1930s, the loudspeaker and the gramophone, should be added the textbook and the blackboard.

Male Adolescence in Mid-Victorian Fiction

Male Adolescence in Mid-Victorian Fiction PDF Author: Alice Crossley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317102126
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
Focusing on works by George Meredith, W. M. Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope, Alice Crossley examines the emergence of adolescence in the mid-Victorian period as a distinct form of experience. Adolescence, Crossley shows, appears as a discrete category of identity that draws on but is nonetheless distinguishable from other masculine types. Important more as a stage of psychological awareness and maturation than as a period of biological youth, Crossley argues that the plasticity of male adolescence provides Meredith, Thackeray, and Trollope with opportunities for self-reflection and social criticism while also working as a paradigm for narrative and imaginative inquiry about motivation, egotism, emotional and physical relationships, and the possibilities of self-creation. Adolescence emerges as a crucial stage of individual growth, adopted by these authors in order to reflect more fully on cultural and personal anxieties about manliness. The centrality of male youth in these authors’ novels, Crossley demonstrates, repositions age-consciousness as an integral part of nineteenth-century debates about masculine heterogeneity.

The School Story

The School Story PDF Author: David Aitchison
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496837665
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
The School Story: Young Adult Narratives in the Age of Neoliberalism examines the work of contemporary writers, filmmakers, and critics who, reflecting on the realm of school experience, help to shape dominant ideas of school. The creations discussed are mostly stories for children and young adults. David Aitchison looks at serious novels for teens including Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak and Faiza Guène’s Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow, the light-hearted, middle-grade fiction of Andrew Clements and Tommy Greenwald, and Malala Yousafzai’s autobiography for young readers, I Am Malala. He also responds to stories that take young people as their primary subjects in such novels as Sapphire’s Push and films including Battle Royale and Cooties. Though ranging widely in their accounts of young life, such stories betray a mounting sense of crisis in education around the world, especially in terms of equity (the extent to which students from diverse backgrounds have fair chances of receiving quality education) and empowerment (the extent to which diverse students are encouraged to gain strength, confidence, and selfhood as learners). Drawing particular attention to the influence of neoliberal initiatives on school experience, this book considers what it means when learning and success are measured more and more by entrepreneurship, competitive individualism, and marketplace gains. Attentive to the ways in which power structures, institutional routines, school spaces, and social relations operate in the contemporary school story, The School Story offers provocative insights into a genre that speaks profoundly to the increasingly precarious position of education in the twenty-first century.

James Joyce and Education

James Joyce and Education PDF Author: Len Platt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000341364
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
James Joyce and Education is the first full-length study of education across the Joyce oeuvre. A new account of how the politics and aesthetics of the Joyce text is informed by historical contexts, it is the latest contribution to the growing contemporary debate about education, late modernism and literary innovation. This highly original account reads Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in new and challenging ways. It produces the Joyce text as a complex and comic devotion to the representation of schooled education — an exemplification of the elitism that state schooling was historically designed to reproduce and a devastating undoing of the epistemologies it was designed to sustain. Chapters explore a range of themes, including Joyce and radical education, the impact of Nietzsche’s writing on Joyce and women and education. The book will appeal to researchers, scholars and postgraduate students in the fields of literature in education, pedagogy, Joyce scholarship and modernism.

Europe in the Classroom

Europe in the Classroom PDF Author: Simona Szakács
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319602586
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This book provides an unconventional account of post-1989 education reform in Romania. By drawing on policy documentation, interviews with key players, qualitative data from everyday school contexts, and extensive textbook analysis, this groundbreaking study explores change within the Romanian education system as a process that institutionalises world culture through symbolic mediation of the concept ‘Europe’. The book argues that the education system’s structural and organisational evolution through time is decoupled from its self-depiction by ultimately serving a nation-building agenda. It does so despite notable changes in the discourse reflecting increasingly transnational definitions of the mission of the school in the post-1989 era. The book also suggests that the notions of ‘nation’ and ‘citizen’ institutionalised by the school are gradually being redefined as cosmopolitan, matching post-war patterns of post-national affiliations on a worldwide level.

Children's Literature and Capitalism

Children's Literature and Capitalism PDF Author: C. Parkes
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137265094
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
After the first phase of industrialization in Britain, the child emerged as both a victim of and a threat to capitalism. This book explores the changing relationship between the child and capitalist society in the works of some of the most important writers of children's and young-adult texts in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.

Masculine Plural

Masculine Plural PDF Author: Jennifer Ingleheart
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192551604
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
The Classics were core to the curriculum and ethos of the intensely homosocial Victorian and Edwardian public schools, yet ancient homosexuality and erotic pedagogy were problematic to the educational establishment, which expurgated classical texts with sexual content. This volume analyses the intimate and uncomfortable nexus between the Classics, sex, and education primarily through the figure of the schoolmaster Philip Gillespie Bainbrigge (1890-1918), whose clandestine writings not only explore homoerotic desires but also offer insightful comments on Classical education. Now a marginalized figure, Bainbrigge's surviving works - a verse drama entitled Achilles in Scyros featuring a cross-dressing Achilles and a Chorus of lesbian schoolgirls, and a Latin dialogue between schoolboys - vividly demonstrate the queer potential of Classics and are marked by a celebration of the pleasures of sex and a refusal to apologize for homoerotic desire. Reprinted here in their entirety, they are accompanied by chapters setting them in their social and literary context, including their parallels with the writings of Bainbrigge's contemporaries and near contemporaries, such as John Addington Symonds, E. M. Forster, and A. E. Housman. What emerges is a provocative new perspective on the history of sexuality and the place of the Classics within that history, which demonstrates that a highly queer version of Classics was possible in private contexts.

British Hymn Books for Children, 1800-1900

British Hymn Books for Children, 1800-1900 PDF Author: Dr Alisa Clapp-Itnyre
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1472407016
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
Examining nineteenth-century British hymns for children, Alisa Clapp-Itnyre argues that the unique qualities of children's hymnody created a space for children's empowerment. Unlike other literature of the era, hymn books were often compilations of many writers' hymns, presenting the discerning child with a multitude of perspectives on religion and childhood. In addition, the agency afforded children as singers meant that they were actively engaged with the text, music, and pictures of their hymnals. Clapp-Itnyre charts the history of children’s hymn-book publications from early to late nineteenth century, considering major denominational movements, the importance of musical tonality as it affected the popularity of hymns to both adults and children, and children’s reformation of adult society provided by such genres as missionary and temperance hymns. While hymn books appear to distinguish 'the child' from 'the adult', intricate issues of theology and poetry - typically kept within the domain of adulthood - were purposely conveyed to those of younger years and comprehension. Ultimately, Clapp-Itnyre shows how children's hymns complicate our understanding of the child-adult binary traditionally seen to be a hallmark of Victorian society. Intersecting with major aesthetic movements of the period, from the peaking of Victorian hymnody to the Golden Age of Illustration, children’s hymn books require scholarly attention to deepen our understanding of the complex aesthetic network for children and adults. Informed by extensive archival research, British Hymn Books for Children, 1800-1900 brings this understudied genre of Victorian culture to critical light.

Gilded Youth

Gilded Youth PDF Author: James Brooke-Smith
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789140927
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
The British public school is an iconic institution, a training ground for the ruling elite and a symbol of national identity and tradition. But beyond the elegant architecture and evergreen playing fields is a turbulent history of teenage rebellion, sexual dissidence, and political radicalism. James Brooke-Smith wades into the wilder shores of public-school life over the last three hundred years in Gilded Youth. He uncovers armed mutinies in the late eighteenth century, a Victorian craze for flagellation, dandy-aesthetes of the 1920s, quasi-scientific discourse on masturbation, Communist scares in the 1930s, and the salacious tabloid scandals of the present day. Drawing on personal experience, extensive research, and public school representations in poetry, school slang, spy films, popular novels, and rock music, Brooke-Smith offers a fresh account of upper-class adolescence in Britain and the role of elite private education in shaping youth culture. He shows how this central British institution has inspired a counterculture of artists, intellectuals, and radicals—from Percy Shelley and George Orwell to Peter Gabriel and Richard Branson—who have rebelled against both the schools themselves and the wider society for which they stand. Written with verve and humor in the tradition of Owen Jones’s The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It, this highly original cultural history is an eye-opening leap over the hallowed iron gates of privilege—and perturbation.