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.
The Play of Belief in Nineteenth-Century Fairy Tales and Fairy Narratives
1st Edition
By Laura White
June 08, 2026
The Play of Belief in Nineteenth-Century Fairy Tales and Fairy Narratives examines the range of playful negotiations with truth claims in British and American fantasies for children of the nineteenth century within the context of the era’s ebbing Christian commitments and competing forces for ...
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, ...
Ethics and Children's Literature
1st Edition
By Claudia Mills
October 14, 2024
Exploring the ethical questions posed by, in, and about children’s literature, this collection examines the way texts intended for children raise questions of value, depict the moral development of their characters, and call into attention shared moral presuppositions. The essays in Part I look at ...
Representing Children in Chinese and U.S. Children's Literature
1st Edition
Edited
By Claudia Nelson, Rebecca Morris
October 14, 2024
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. The volume’s five ...
Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel
1st Edition
By Sandra Dinter
August 29, 2022
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. Assembling analyses of key works by Ian McEwan, Doris Lessing, P. D. ...
Children, Childhood, and Musical Theater
1st Edition
Edited
By Donelle Ruwe, James Leve
August 29, 2022
Bringing together scholars from musicology, literature, childhood studies, and theater, this volume examines the ways in which children's musicals tap into adult nostalgia for childhood while appealing to the needs and consumer potential of the child. The contributors take up a wide range of ...
Empty Nurseries, Queer Occupants: Reproduction and the Future in Ibsen’s Late Plays
1st Edition
By Olivia Gunn
August 29, 2022
Who is the proper occupant of the nursery? The obvious answer is the child, and not an archive, a seductive troll-princess, or poor fosterlings. Nevertheless, characters in Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, and Little Eyolf intend to host these improper occupants in their children’s rooms. Dr. Gunn...
Victorian Coral Islands of Empire, Mission, and the Boys’ Adventure Novel
1st Edition
By Michelle Elleray
August 29, 2022
Attending to the mid-Victorian boys’ adventure novel and its connections with missionary culture, Michelle Elleray investigates how empire was conveyed to Victorian children in popular forms, with a focus on the South Pacific as a key location of adventure tales and missionary efforts. The volume ...
Gaming Empire in Children's British Board Games, 1836-1860
1st Edition
By Megan A. Norcia
December 18, 2020
Over a century before Monopoly invited child players to bankrupt one another with merry ruthlessness, a lively and profitable board game industry thrived in Britain from the 1750s onward, thanks to publishers like John Wallis, John Betts, and William Spooner. As part of the new wave of materials ...
Children’s Play in Literature: Investigating the Strengths and the Subversions of the Playing Child
1st Edition
Edited
By Joyce E. Kelley
September 30, 2020
While we owe much to twentieth and twenty-first century researchers’ careful studies of children’s linguistic and dramatic play, authors of literature, especially children’s literature, have matched and even anticipated these researchers in revealing play’s power—authors well aware of the way ...