J. M. Barrie

Sentimental Tommy: The Story of His Childhood - The Kailyard authors J. M. Barrie Revised edition

'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).