Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present: Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present
About the Book Series
This series recognizes and supports innovative work on the child and on literature for children and adolescents that informs teaching and engages with current and emerging debates in the field. Proposals are welcome for interdisciplinary and comparative studies by humanities scholars working in a variety of fields, including literature; book history, periodicals history, and print culture and the sociology of texts; theater, film, musicology, and performance studies; history, including the history of education; gender studies; art history and visual culture; cultural studies; and religion.
Topics might include, among other possibilities, how concepts and representations of the child have changed in response to adult concerns; postcolonial and transnational perspectives; "domestic imperialism" and the acculturation of the young within and across class and ethnic lines; the commercialization of childhood and children's bodies; views of young people as consumers and/or originators of culture; the child and religious discourse; children's and adolescents' self-representations; and adults' recollections of childhood.
Performing Contemporary Childhoods: Being and Becoming a Viral Child
1st Edition
By Bryoni Trezise
December 18, 2024
Performing Contemporary Childhoods: Being and Becoming a Viral Child examines the changing nature of contemporary childhoods by exploring how children’s and young people’s digital media create new ideas about youth agency. Visual cultures of childhood have been traditionally traced in photography....
Male Homosexuality in Children’s Literature, 1867–1918: The Young Uranians
1st Edition
By Eric L. Tribunella
November 28, 2024
In his 1908 cultural and historical study of homosexuality titled The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life, Edward Irenæus Prime-Stevenson includes a section on homosexual juvenile fiction, perhaps the first attempt to identify a body of children’s literature about ...
Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French Children's Literature
1st Edition
By Julie Fette
October 31, 2024
Gender by the Book investigates the gender representations that French children's literature transmits to readers today. Using an interdisciplinary, mixed methods approach, this book grounds its literary analysis in a sociohistorical examination of three key institutions – libraries, book clubs, ...
British Hymn Books for Children, 1800-1900: Re-Tuning the History of Childhood
1st Edition
By Alisa Clapp-Itnyre
January 17, 2019
Examining nineteenth-century British hymns for children, Alisa Clapp-Itnyre argues that the unique qualities of children's hymnody created a space for children's empowerment. Unlike other literature of the era, hymn books were often compilations of many writers' hymns, presenting the discerning ...
French Paintings of Childhood and Adolescence, 1848–1886
1st Edition
By Anna Green
March 29, 2017
The premise of Anna Green's timely and original book, is that nineteenth-century representations of childhood and adolescence-in paintings, but also in other forms of visual culture and in diverse written discourses of the period-are critical for understanding modernity. Whilst such well-worn ...
Genre, Reception, and Adaptation in the 'Twilight' Series
1st Edition
Edited
By Anne Morey
November 28, 2016
Much of the criticism on Stephenie Meyer's immensely popular 'Twilight' novels has underrated or even disparaged the books while belittling the questionable taste of an audience that many believe is being inculcated with anti-feminist values. Avoiding a repetition of such reductive critiques of the...
The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture
1st Edition
Edited
By Dennis Denisoff
November 28, 2016
During the rise of consumer culture in the nineteenth century, children and childhood were called on to fulfill a range of important roles. In addition to being consumers themselves, the young functioned as both 'goods' to be used and consumed by adults and as proof that middle-class materialist ...
Heroism in the Harry Potter Series
1st Edition
Edited
By Katrin Berndt, Lena Steveker
November 23, 2016
Taking up the various conceptions of heroism that are conjured in the Harry Potter series, this collection 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 ...
History and the Construction of the Child in Early British Children's Literature
1st Edition
By Jackie C. Horne
November 17, 2016
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, Jackie C. Horne argues that this shift can be better understood by looking to the discipline of history. ...
Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870-1914
1st Edition
By Simon Sleight
November 17, 2016
Baby booms have a long history. In 1870, colonial Melbourne was ’perspiring juvenile humanity’ with an astonishing 42 per cent of the city’s inhabitants aged 14 and under - a demographic anomaly resulting from the gold rushes of the 1850s. Within this context, Simon Sleight enters the heated debate...
Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth-Century England: Literature, Representation, and the NSPCC
1st Edition
By Monica Flegel
November 15, 2016
Moving nimbly between literary and historical texts, Monica Flegel provides a much-needed 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. Flegel ...
The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature: Estate, Blood, and Body
1st Edition
By Cheryl L. Nixon
November 15, 2016
Cheryl Nixon's book is the first to connect the eighteenth-century fictional orphan and factual orphan, emphasizing the legal concepts of estate, blood, and body. Examining novels by authors such as Eliza Haywood, Tobias Smollett, and Elizabeth Inchbald, and referencing never-before analyzed case ...