Lexington Books
Pages: 210
Trim: 6¼ x 9¼
978-1-66690-193-1 • Hardback • October 2022 • $100.00 • (£77.00)
978-1-66690-194-8 • eBook • October 2022 • $45.00 • (£35.00)
Alexander H. Pitofsky is professor of English at Appalachian State University.
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 unprecedented ways. These new writers present characters who are rich and underprivileged, white and Black, male and female, adolescent and middle-aged, conformist and rebellious. By turning their attention away from the bruised feelings of teenagers, they have reinvented American boarding-school fiction, writing vividly about a host of subjects the genre overlooked in the past.
The insights presented in American Boarding School Fiction, 1981–2021: Inclusion and Scandal are fresh and invigorating. Alexander H. Pitofsky offers penetrating, well substantiated understandings of his selected texts as well as respect for the desire of most readers of literary analysis to enjoy non-technical prose. This book works as a text-staple for anyone working in the genre of boarding school fiction, whether as a main interest or a tangential one.
— Susan Norton, Technological University Dublin