Tommy and Grizel

Description

'... 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).