This item has FREE SHIPPING to any address in NZ

NOTE: Item will ship from our US warehouse. A handling time of 2-4 business days applies for all orders. Delivery will then take 3-10 working days.

Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood: The Progressive Era Creation of the Schoolboy Sports Story

Condition: BRAND NEW ISBN: 9781557286826 Author(s): Ryan K. Anderson Format: Paperback Year: 2015 Publisher: University of Arkansas Press Dimensions: 147 x 226 x 23 (w x l x h) Pages: 320 Series: Sport, Culture & Society

BUYER OFFERS: We are a retail store with set pricing and unfortunately we can't fulfil any requests to sell items for less than the listed price.

Description: Gilbert Patten, writing as Burt L. Standish, made a career of generating serialized twenty-thousand-word stories featuring his fictional creation Frank Merriwell, a student athlete at Yale University who inspired others to emulate his example of manly boyhood. Patten and his publisher, Street and Smith, initially had only a general idea about what would constitute Merriwell's adventures and who would want to read about them when they introduced the hero in the dime novel Tip Top Weekly in1896, but over the years what took shape was a story line that capitalized on middle-class fears about the insidious influence of modern life on the nation's boys. Merriwell came to symbolize the Progressive Era debate about how sport and school made boys into men. The saga featured the attractive Merriwell distinguishing between 'good' and 'bad' girls and focused on his squeaky-clean adventures in physical development and mentorship.By the serial's conclusion, Merriwell had opened a school for 'weak and wayward boys' that made him into a figure who taught readers how to approximate his example. In Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood, Andersontreats Tip Top Weekly as a historical artifact, supplementing his reading of its text, illustrations, reader letters, and advertisements with his use of editorial