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Author Jacobson, Marcia Ann

Title Being a boy again : autobiography and the American boy book / Marcia Jacobson
Published Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press, ©1994

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Description 1 online resource (188 pages)
Contents The boy book : the historical context, fiction and autobiography -- Thomas Bailey Aldrich and Charles Dudley Warner -- Mark Twain -- William Dean Howells -- Hamlin Garland -- Stephen Crane -- Booth Tarkington -- The end of the boy book
Summary Marcia Jacobson's Being a Boy Again identifies a literary genre that flourished between the Civil War and World War I - the American boy book. Jacobson distinguishes the boy book tradition from the didactic story for boys and the developmental autobiography of childhood, describing it as an autobiographical form that concentrates on boyhood alone. She discusses what gave rise to the boy book, what forms it took, what problems it addressed, and finally, why it disappeared
Jacobson finds her answers in the widespread social and economic changes of the second half of the 19th century, as well as in the personal crisis that inspired each of the boy books. She argues that key works by such writers as Thomas Bailey Aldrich, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Booth Tarkington marked a nostalgic retreat to being a boy again in the face of the difficulties of being a man in 19th-century America. The interplay between the narrating male adult in these books and the child he once was results in wonderfully innovative books - all of which have at their core the narrator's confrontation with his father, the person who should have taught him how to be a man and who inevitably is found wanting
Jacobson concludes her study by looking briefly at the social and intellectual changes that brought the genre to its end. She also suggests that in its rich variety of form and texture, the boy book should be recognized as a precursor of the imaginative autobiography we associate with 20th-century writers
Analysis English fiction
United States
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 173-184) and index
Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
English
digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
Print version record
Subject Autobiographical fiction, American -- Male authors -- History and criticism
American prose literature -- Male authors -- History and criticism
Boys -- United States -- Biography -- History and criticism
Boys in literature.
Autobiography.
Autobiographies as Topic
autobiography (genre)
LITERARY CRITICISM -- American -- General.
American prose literature -- Male authors
Autobiography
Boys -- Biography
Boys in literature
Jongensboeken.
Autobiografieën.
Amerikaans.
United States
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
LC no. 94014510
ISBN 0585247161
9780585247168