British And American School Stories 1910 1960

This book examines school and college fiction for girls in Britain and the United States, written in the first half of the twentieth century, to explore the formation and ideologies of feminine identity. Nancy G. Rosoff and Stephanie Spencer develop a transnational framework that recognises how both constructed and essential femininities transcend national boundaries. The book discusses the significance and performance of female friendship across time and place, which is central to the development of the genre, and how it functioned as an important means of informal education. Stories by Jessie Graham Flower, Pauline Lester, Alice Ross Colver, Elinor Brent-Dyer, and Dorita Fairlie Bruce are set within their historical context and then used to explore aspects of sociability, authority, responsibility, domesticity, and possibility. The distinctiveness of this book stems from the historical analysis of these sources, which have so far primarily been treated by literary scholars within their national context. Winner of the History of Education Society Anne Bloomfield Prize for the best book on history of education published in English 2017-19

This book draws on recent deconstructions around the idea of ‘femininity’ as a social, racial and class construct and explores the diversity of spaces that may be defined as educational that range from institutional contexts to family, to professional outlooks, to racial identity, to defining community and religious groupings. It explores how notions of femininity change across time and place, and within individual lives. Such changes take place at the interface of external forces and individual agency. The application of the notion of ‘femininity’ that assumes a consistent definition of the term is interrogated by the authors, leading to a discussion of the rich possibilities for new directions in research into women’s lives across time, place, and individual life histories.

The Routledge History of Loneliness takes a multidisciplinary approach to the history of a modern emotion, exploring its form and development across cultures from the seventeenth century to the present. Bringing together thirty scholars from various disciplines, including history, anthropology, philosophy, literature and art history, the volume considers how loneliness was represented in art and literature, conceptualised by philosophers and writers and described by people in their personal narratives. It considers loneliness as a feeling so often defined in contrast to sociability and affective connections, particularly attending to loneliness in relation to the family, household and community. Acknowledging that loneliness is a relatively novel term in English, the book explores its precedents in ideas about solitude, melancholy and nostalgia, as well as how it might be considered in cross-cultural perspectives. With wide appeal to students and researchers in a variety of subjects, including the history of emotions, social sciences and literature, this volume brings a critical historical perspective to an emotion with contemporary significance.

This seminal work examines the concurrence of childhood rebellion and conformity in Bengali literary texts (including adult texts), a pertinent yet unexplored area, making it a first of its kind. It is a study of the voice of child protagonists across children’s and adult literature in Bengali vis-à-vis the institutions of family, the education system, and the nationalist movement in the ninenteenth and twentieth centuries.