Unseen Academy: John Knowles's A Separate Peace
Boarding-school literature, the British critic John Lucas argued recently, is often marked by "Empire-era myopia" and "tacit approval of a class-ridden, exclusionist society". That may have been so in the UK before World War I, but when it comes to American school fiction Lucas i...
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| Published in: | Papers on language & literature 2013-09, Vol.49 (4), p.390-390 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
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| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Boarding-school literature, the British critic John Lucas argued recently, is often marked by "Empire-era myopia" and "tacit approval of a class-ridden, exclusionist society". That may have been so in the UK before World War I, but when it comes to American school fiction Lucas is mistaken. F. Scott Fitzgerald, J. D. Salinger, Richard Yates, and many other American writers have examined prep-school life in highly skeptical ways. One rare exception is John Knowles's novel A Separate Peace. Instead of raising doubts about exclusive private schools, Knowles carefully shields his fictional academy from criticism. In A Separate Peace, by contrast, John Knowles ensures that the reader will not learn much about the Devon School. To begin with, the novel's early chapters take place during the first summer session in the school's 163-year history, a time in which familiar routines are set aside. As Hallman Bell Bryant explains, Exeter's summer classes in the early 1940s were part of a special curriculum designed to help students finish their secondary education before serving in the military. |
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| ISSN: | 0031-1294 |