School story
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The school story is a genre of fiction, basic to much of the children's literature of the twentieth century. The boarding school is a very common setting, with its plot advantages of the absence of parents and a relatively closed society. The first true school story may have been Tom Brown's Schooldays, which was followed by innumerable Victorian era imitations, and magazine series. The Harry Potter series of novels has spectacularly revived some of the generic conventions.
Commercially-successful authors of school novels have included P. G. Wodehouse and Enid Blyton. The audience for such fiction was always larger than those in or after boarding-school education: schools were to some extent fantasy locations. Few such books were realistic (an exception being Kipling's Stalky & Co., which horrified Edmund Wilson). The sub-genre of girls' school novels (Angela Brazil and others) shows this even more, since fewer British girls than boys were educated away from home. Stock themes (compulsory sport, popularity, bullying, food (i.e. hunger), the stranger and the familiar, crime and punishment) sustained a huge volume, in particular of short stories.
See also
- The Gem
- The Magnet
- Frederic William Farrar
- Frank Richards
- Billy Bunter
- St. Clare's series
- Malory Towers
- Harold Avery
- Elinor Brent-Dyer
- Chalet School
- Antonia Forest, Kingscote School for Girls
- Anthony Buckeridge (Jennings in a boarding school, Rex Milligan in a grammar school)
- Margaret Biggs
- Geoffrey Trease
- Nigel Molesworth
- A.J. Wentworth, B.A. [link] (Comic stories about a hapless prep school master by H F Ellis)
- Goodbye, Mr Chips
- Botchan by Natsume Soseki
- St. Trinian's School
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