Queer Nostalgia, Colonialism, and the Girls’ Boarding School Novel, 1933–2023

Revisiting and re-evaluating the girls’ boarding school novel from an intersectional lens, this book analyses the role a queer aesthetic has played within the context of the boarding school imaginary in British and postcolonial literatures, and asks why the girls’ boarding school is a place to which authors consistently return.

Queer Nostalgia, Colonialism, and the Girls’ Boarding School Novel, 1933–2023 revisits and re-evaluates the girls’ boarding school novel from an intersectional lens. It analyses the role a queer aesthetic has played within the context of the boarding school imaginary in British and postcolonial literatures, and asks why the girls’ boarding school is a place to which authors consistently return. Chris Roulston provides a fresh reading of how this literary subgenre engages with questions of temporality and history in ways that trouble notions of linear progression. Often bridging fiction and memoir, the boarding school narrative is typically part memory work and part social and political critique. Closely aligned with the history of colonialism and achieving its heyday as the British Empire reached global domination in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the girls’ boarding school contributed to shaping nationalist and imperialist objectives. Drawing on six boarding school novels published between 1933 and 2023, including works from Britain, India, and Australia, this study questions whether queerness and queering within the genre disrupt normative and colonial models or they are in complicit alignment with the privileges the institution protects. For readers interested in queer theory, postcolonial studies, or the enduring cultural significance of boarding schools, this book offers fresh insights into a literary tradition that continues to captivate contemporary audiences.