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“From Fag to Monitor; Or, Fighting to the Front”: Art and Power in Public School Memoirs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Regenia Gagnier
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Extract

This paper is intended to suggest how an educational system produced a literary community and discursive practice that represented itself as essentially distinct from the realm of political power. My subject is the foundations in the English Public Schools of the modern British literary community and literary value as we have known it from Romanticism through modernism – value measured by the self-consciousness, introspection, individuality, and putative autonomy that are challenged if not already defeated by the forces of post-modernism. But before examining what happened between Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays of 1857 and Cyril Connolly's A Georgian Boyhood of 1938, I shall provide a brief historical summary for readers unfamiliar with the English public schools.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 16 , Spring 1988 , pp. 15 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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