Bücher der Reihe Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present

By analysing the competing discourses within girls' periodicals, this book demonstrates how they were able to frame feminine behaviour in ways that both reinforced and redefined the changing role of girls in nineteenth-century society while also allowing girl readers the opportunity to respond to these definitions.

Since the 1980s novels about childhood for adults have been a booming genre within the contemporary British literary market. Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel offers the first comprehensive study of this literary trend.

Interrogates how different concepts of childhood proliferated and were construed in several eighteenth-century periodicals and satirical prints. This work analyses the textual and graphic constructions of the child's body, educational debates, and how the shift from genealogical to affective bonding affected conceptions of parent-child relations.

Examining novels by authors such as Eliza Haywood, Tobias Smollett, and Elizabeth Inchbald, and referencing case records, this title reconstructs the narratives of real orphans in the British parliamentary, equity, and common law courts and compares them to the narratives of fictional orphans.

Responding to the increasingly powerful presence of dystopian literature for young adults, this volume focuses on novels featuring a female protagonist who contends with societal and governmental threats at the same time that she is navigating the treacherous waters of young adulthood. The contributors relate the liminal nature of the female protagonist to liminality as a unifying feature of dystopian literature, literature for and about young women, and cultural expectations of adolescent womanhood. Divided into three sections, the collection investigates cultural assumptions and expectations of adolescent women, considers the various means of resistance and rebellion made available to and explored by female protagonists, and examines how the adolescent female protagonist is situated with respect to the groups and environments that surround her. In a series of thought-provoking essays on a wide range of writers that includes Libba Bray, Scott Westerfeld, Tahereh Mafi, Veronica Roth, Marissa Meyer, Ally Condie, and Suzanne Collins, the collection makes a convincing case for how this rebellious figure interrogates the competing constructions of adolescent womanhood in late-twentieth- and early twenty-first-century culture.

Empty Nurseries, Queer Occupants intervenes in scholarly debates in child studies by arguing that the empty bourgeois nursery is a better symbol for innocence than the child.

Taking up the understudied relationship between the cultural history of childhood and media studies, this volume traces twentieth-century migrations of the child-savage analogy from colonial into postcolonial discourse across a wide range of old and new media. Older and newer media such as films, textbooks, children''s literature, periodicals, comic strips, children''s radio, and toys are deeply implicated in each other through ongoing ''remediation'', meaning that they continually mimic, absorb and transform each other''s representational formats, stylistic features, and content. Media theory thus confronts the cultural history of childhood with the challenge of re-thinking change in childhood imaginaries as transformation-through-repetition patterns, rather than as rise-shine-decline sequences. This volume takes up this challenge, demonstrating that one historical epoch may well accommodate diverging childhood repertoires, which are recycled again and again as they are played out across a whole gamut of different media formats in the course of time.

Drawing on examples from British world expressions of Christianity, this collection further greater understanding of religion as a critical element of modern children¿s and young people¿s history.

This volume traces twentieth-century migrations of the child-savage analogy from colonial into postcolonial discourse across a wide range of old and new media, including films, textbooks, children's literature, periodicals, comic strips, children's radio, toys, and digital games. In particular, the collection takes up the important questions of how the trope of the child savage is fleshed out from one medium to another and what cultural, social, and political functions it fulfills on diverse occasions.

Focusing on questions of space and locale in children's literature, this collection explores how metaphorical and physical space can create landscapes of power, knowledge, and identity in texts from the early nineteenth century to the present.

Examining the experiences of very young 'native' children in three British colonies, the authors focus on the shared as well as unique aspects of the colonial experience in infant schools across the northern part of the North Island of New Zealand, Upper Canada, and British-controlled India. Informed by archival research.

Conceived to explore the relationship between children's vernacular play cultures and their media-based play, this collection challenges two popular misconceptions: that children's play is dying out and that it is threatened by contemporary media such as television and computer games.

Pearson examines British children's literature during the period widely regarded as a 'second golden age', giving particular attention to children's book publishing. Making use of archival resources, she explores the careers of influential children's book editors.

Reflects the advanced developments in Disney and Disney-Pixar animation such as the apocalyptic tale of earth's failed ecosystem, "WALL-E". This title examines a range of Disney's feature animations, in which images of wild nature are central to the narrative.

Conceived to explore the relationship between children's vernacular play cultures and their media-based play, this collection challenges two popular misconceptions: that children's play is dying out and that it is threatened by contemporary media such as television and computer games.

How did the 'flat' characters of eighteenth-century children's literature become 'round' by the mid-nineteenth? While previous critics have pointed to literary Romanticism for an explanation, this book argues that this shift can be understood by looking to the discipline of history.

Adopts a cultural studies framework to explore the range of scholarly concerns awakened by Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" novels and their filmic adaptations. This title examines "Twilight's" debts to its predecessors in young adult, vampire, and romance literature; and issues in fan and critical reception in the United States and Korea.

Bringing together children's literature scholars from China and the United States, this collection provides an introduction to the scope and goals of a field characterized by active but also distinctive scholarship in two countries with very different rhetorical traditions.

In her exploration of China in British children's literature, Shih-Wen Chen considers travelogue storybooks, historical novels, adventure stories and periodicals to demonstrate the diversity of images of China in the Victorian and Edwardian imagination.

Argues that the social construction of the public schoolboy, a figure made ubiquitous by a huge body of fictional, biographical, and journalistic work, had a role to play in the development of social perceptions of adolescence and in forming ideas of how young people should be educated to become citizens in an age of increasing democracy.

Offers an interpretive framework for understanding the specific formulation of child cruelty popularized by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) in the late nineteenth century. This book examines the emergence of child abuse as a subject of legal and social concern in England.

Despite Kipling's popularity as an author and his standing as a politically controversial figure, much of his work has remained relatively unexamined due to its characterization as 'children's literature'. This book challenges the division between 'children's' and 'adult' literature.

Offering a wide range of critical perspectives, this volume explores the moral, ideological and literary landscapes in fiction and other cultural productions aimed at young adults. It illuminates the ways in which the cultural constructions 'adolescent' and 'young adult fiction' share some of society's most painful anxieties and contradictions.

Examines the ways fictional heroism in the twenty-first century challenges the idealized forms of a somewhat simplistic masculinity associated with genres like the epic, romance and classic adventure story.

Using turn-of-the-century Melbourne as a prime historical location for investigating the relationship between a discourse of youth, youthful experience and the shaping of new urban spaces, Simon Sleight examines the uses of public space for purposes of play, street work, consumerism, courtship, gang-related activities and civic parades.

Researchers have neglected the cultural history of education and as a result women's educational works have been disparaged as narrowly didactic and redundant to the history of ideas. This book serves as a corrective to these biases by culturally contextualising the popular educational writings of leading women moralists and activists.