The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett: In "the World of Actual Literature"

The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett: In "the World of Actual Literature"
ISBN-10
1785273647
ISBN-13
9781785273643
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
250
Language
English
Published
2020-05-02
Author
Thomas Recchio

Description

Frances Hodgson Burnett is remembered today as the author of the children's classic "The Secret Garden," but in her lifetime she had a long and successful career as a novelist, dramatist and writer of children's stories. Born in 1849 in Manchester, England, Burnett settled in Tennessee with her mother and siblings at sixteen after her father's death. She began writing stories to supplement her family's income. With the acceptance of the story "Surly Tim's Trouble" by "Scribner's Magazine" in New York and the subsequent publication of her first novel "That Lass O'Lowries" in 1877, the critics hailed Burnett as a new voice in American fiction comparing her favorably to Charles Dickens. Her early novels were written in the Victorian realistic tradition, but with her ambitious Washington novel "Through One Administration" she began a long period of genre experimentation, writing two allegorical historical novels, two transatlantic Anglo-American novels and two post-World War I novels that wrestled with the broad problem of meaning in Western culture in the wake of the war. "The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett" reads her novels in the context of the changing literary field in England and the United States in the years between the death of George Eliot in 1880 through to the Great War. Read as a body of literary fiction in relation to Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James and T. S. Eliot among others, and read in the context of literary realism, historical fiction, the sensation novel and so on, Burnett's novels constitute an important thread that chronicles the changing contexts and forms of English and American fiction from the end of the Victorian period to the Jazz Age of the 1920s.

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