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Early children's literature took the forms of complex, distinct genres that, much more than the novels being published contemporaneously with them, were employed in the didactic effect of literary structures. These works, published roughly from 1750-1850, do not assume a simple, one-to-one relationship between fictional worlds and the real world. They are aware of the complexities of representation, and, written and read predominantly by women and girls, they are especially aware of representation's effects on gender. Early children's fiction, I argue, treats literary and social forms alike as structure-at-work in the world, and this treatment had a substantive impact on fiction that shares its interest in the subtleties of gender formation and the disparate treatment of gendered beings in fiction and in fact: the nineteenth-century realist novel. From one perspective, this project is a straightforward, genre-study of early children's fiction and its influence on the Victorian realist novel. I focus on four major genres, selected for their numerousness and their continued though adapted use in fiction, and I think carefully about the bids they made on readers. Rather than teach simple morals, I argue that these works teach people to analyze in culturally-prescribed ways: to see a situation in the world, understand what it means, and react to it accordingly. By emphasizing analysis as a response to structure, this fiction signals the construction of social categories. By adopting and adapting these forms, novelists like Dickens and the Brontes engage children’s fictions’ educational goals and emphasize the degree to which reality is defined by social, material, embodied, and familial forms. Ultimately, I demonstrate that that the didacticism which we have for so long assumed was simple and straightforward is, in fact, a kind of formalism, one that codifies structures of response and embodiment that belie its reputation as pure content.

This dissertation examines literary representations of the intersection between British imperialism and British and British-modeled public schools. I categorize British writers who have addressed this nexus in their literary works into two groups, idealists and realists, based on their views of British public schools, imperialism, and the effectiveness of the former in sustaining the latter. I present two examples of idealists, Henry Newbolt and the contributors to The Boy's Own Paper, followed by two examples of realists, Rudyard Kipling and E. M. Forster, who have often been viewed as opposites. I then provide an example of a South-Asian diasporic realist, Selvaduari, who builds upon the critiques of British realists by revealing the contemporary offspring of the marriage between British public schools and imperialism. By analyzing works by idealist and realist authors, I demonstrate the importance of public schools and school literature in promoting and sustaining as well as critiquing and condemning imperialism.

This dissertation examines literary representations of the intersection between British imperialism and British and British-modeled public schools. I categorize British writers who have addressed this nexus in their literary works into two groups, idealists and realists, based on their views of British public schools, imperialism, and the effectiveness of the former in sustaining the latter. I present two examples of idealists, Henry Newbolt and the contributors to The Boy's Own Paper, followed by two examples of realists, Rudyard Kipling and E. M. Forster, who have often been viewed as opposites. I then provide an example of a South-Asian diasporic realist, Selvaduari, who builds upon the critiques of British realists by revealing the contemporary offspring of the marriage between British public schools and imperialism. By analyzing works by idealist and realist authors, I demonstrate the importance of public schools and school literature in promoting and sustaining as well as critiquing and condemning imperialism.