American Boarding School Fiction, 1981–2021

Alexander H. Pitofsky is professor of English at Appalachian State University.

American Boarding School Fiction, 1981–2021: Inclusion and Scandal is a study of contemporary American boarding-school narratives. Before the 1980s, writers of American boarding-school fiction tended to concentrate on mournful teenagers – the center was filled with students: white, male, Protestant students at boys’ schools. More recently, a new generation of writers–including Richard A. Hawley, Anita Shreve, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Tobias Wolff–has transformed school fiction by highlighting issues relating to gender, race, scandal, sexuality, education, and social class in unprecedented ways. These new writers present characters who are rich and underprivileged, white and Black, male and female, adolescent and middle-aged, conformist and rebellious. By turning their attention away from the bruised feelings of teenagers, they have reinvented American boarding-school fiction, writing vividly about a host of subjects the genre overlooked in the past.