Navigating Between Home and Empire: Mobility and Male Friendship in Tom Brown's Schooldays and The Three Midshipmen Academic Article

abstract

• 2017, Springer Science+Business Media New York. In this article, we investigate the public school novel as represented by Thomas Hughess Tom Browns Schooldays (1857) and the boys sea story as represented by W. H. G. Kingstons The Three Midshipmen (1873). The school novel and the sea story sometimes functioned as twinned forms enabling authors for boys to explore anxieties about male selfhood and relocating oneself in the larger community while growing up. As becomes especially apparent when they are read together, these novels address the boys relationship to home and empire, rootlessness and rootedness. The coming-of-age plot found in the boys books reveals a literature that embraces both rootlessness/mobility and rootedness/community and that posits an all-male version of something closely resembling domestic life as a way to navigate between the two.

authors

• Nelson, Claudia

published proceedings

• CHILDRENS LITERATURE IN EDUCATION

altmetric score

• 0.5

author list (cited authors)

• Kim, S., & Nelson, C.

citation count

• 1

complete list of authors

• Kim, Soyoun||Nelson, Claudia

publication date

• September 2018

publisher

• Springer Nature  Publisher

keywords

• Male Friendship
• School Story
• Sea Story
• Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays
• W. H. G. Kingston, The Three Midshipmen

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

• 10.1007/s10583-017-9321-y

start page

• 323

end page

• 337

volume

• 49

issue

• 3

URL

• http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10583-017-9321-y