The Kailyard authors
3 total works
'This excursion into boyhood in pursuit of its sentimental qualities ...is something new in fiction.' Blackwood's Magazine. Sentimental Tommy is J.M. Barrie's supreme achievement in fiction, and a work that stands alongside Treasure Island and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as one of the finest novels of childhood. It is the story of the boyhood of Tommy Sandys, destined for greatness, whose fertile but dangerous artistic mind creates and controls the worlds of play and reality in which he moves. At the same time the novel is a compelling study of a local community with all its colourful idiosyncracies and narrow-minded prejudices. This is the first edition to carry a detailed critical introduction. Caroline McCracken-Flesher places the work in the context of Barrie's life and career and traces its literary influences and importance. Whether we admire or condemn Tommy for his fantasies, this portrait of the artist as a young decadent displays the brilliant comic imagination of a writer whose mature fiction anticipates many of the developments of modern literature. Caroline McCracken-Flesher is Professor of English at the University of Wyoming.
She was educated at Edinburgh Oxford, and Brown universities, and her books include Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow (Oxford, 2005); The Doctor Dissected: A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke and Hare Murders (Oxford, 2012); and the edited volumes Culture, Nation, and the New Scottish Parliament (Bucknell, 2007); Scotland as Science Fiction (Bucknell, 2011); and Approaches to Teaching the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (MLA, 2012).
She was educated at Edinburgh Oxford, and Brown universities, and her books include Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow (Oxford, 2005); The Doctor Dissected: A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke and Hare Murders (Oxford, 2012); and the edited volumes Culture, Nation, and the New Scottish Parliament (Bucknell, 2007); Scotland as Science Fiction (Bucknell, 2011); and Approaches to Teaching the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (MLA, 2012).
First published in 1891, J.M. Barrie's The Little Minister was quickly identified, along with Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, as one of the two great literary events of the year. Within the space of two years the book had sold in excess of 35,000 copies. Set in 'Thrums', the fictional name for the author's native Kirriemuir, the story follows the wistful love affair of Gavin Dishart, pious 'little' minister of the Auld Licht Kirk, and Babbie, a mysterious gypsy woman who emerges from the fairy world of Caddam Wood. Blending realism with romance, humour and pathos, The Little Minister shows all the touches of charm and genius that would come to fruition in the author's later work. A new introduction by Melodee Mattson lays emphasis on Barrie's formal and artistic concerns, discussing his preoccupation with sympathy, fantasy and illusion, issues that position his work as central to the literary culture of the 1890s. Melodee R. Mattson studied literature at Montana State University - Billings and received an M.Litt. in English Literary Studies from the University of Aberdeen, where she researched the early fiction of J.M. Barrie.She resides in Billings, Montana, where she teaches literature.
'...an extraordinary, and an unjustly forgotten, novel.' -- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet. The second of J.M. Barrie's two novels about 'the celebrated Tommy', Tommy and Grizel is a richly ambivalent study of the destructive potential of the artistic imagination. Strikingly modern in its psychological and psychosexual concerns, the novel had a profound influence on the young D.H. Lawrence, whose sensibility was drawn to this searching examination of the complex emotions that beset the creator of fictions. Written at a critical moment in the construction of modern forms of sexual subjectivity, Tommy and Grizel is also a fascinating examination of the ambiguities and uncertainties of male desire. With a new critical introduction by Caroline McCracken-Flesher, which identifies sources, situates the work in Barrie's life and career, and examines the innovative form of the novel, readers can at last encounter this neglected work that ushered in a new era for the modern novel. Caroline McCracken-Flesher is Professor of English at the University of Wyoming.
She was educated at Edinburgh Oxford, and Brown universities, and her books include Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow (Oxford, 2005); The Doctor Dissected: A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke and Hare Murders (Oxford, 2012); and the edited volumes Culture, Nation, and the New Scottish Parliament (Bucknell, 2007); Scotland as Science Fiction (Bucknell, 2011); and Approaches to Teaching the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (MLA, 2012).
She was educated at Edinburgh Oxford, and Brown universities, and her books include Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow (Oxford, 2005); The Doctor Dissected: A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke and Hare Murders (Oxford, 2012); and the edited volumes Culture, Nation, and the New Scottish Parliament (Bucknell, 2007); Scotland as Science Fiction (Bucknell, 2011); and Approaches to Teaching the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (MLA, 2012).