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.
Framing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals and Prints, 1689–1789
1st Edition
By Anja Müller
November 10, 2016
Shedding light on an important and neglected topic in childhood studies, Anja Müller interrogates how different concepts of childhood proliferated and were construed in several important eighteenth-century periodicals and satirical prints. Müller focuses on The Tatler, The Spectator, The Guardian...
The Making of Modern Children's Literature in Britain: Publishing and Criticism in the 1960s and 1970s
1st Edition
By Lucy Pearson
October 31, 2016
Lucy Pearson’s lively and engaging book examines British children’s literature during the period widely regarded as a ’second golden age’. Drawing extensively on archival material, Pearson investigates the practical and ideological factors that shaped ideas of ’good’ children’s literature in ...
Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods: Nineteenth-Century Missionary Infant Schools in Three British Colonies
1st Edition
By Helen May, Baljit Kaur
October 19, 2016
Taking up a little-known story of education, schooling, and missionary endeavor, Helen May, Baljit Kaur, and Larry Prochner focus on the experiences of very young ’native’ children in three British colonies. In missionary settlements across the northern part of the North Island of New Zealand, ...
Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century: Age and Identity
1st Edition
Edited
By Anja Müller
October 19, 2016
This innovative collection of essays re-examines conventional ideas of the history of childhood, exploring the child's increasing prominence in eighteenth-century discourse and the establishment of the category of age as a marker of social distinction alongside race, class and gender. While ...
Kipling's Children's Literature: Language, Identity, and Constructions of Childhood
1st Edition
By Sue Walsh
October 19, 2016
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'. Sue Walsh challenges the apparently clear division between 'children's' and 'adult' ...
Public School Literature, Civic Education and the Politics of Male Adolescence
1st Edition
By Jenny Holt
October 19, 2016
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British society gradually began to see 'adolescence' as a distinct social entity worthy of concentrated study and debate. Jenny Holt argues that the social construction of the public schoolboy, a figure made ubiquitous by a huge body of fictional...
Women and the Shaping of the Nation's Young: Education and Public Doctrine in Britain 1750–1850
1st Edition
By Mary Hilton
October 19, 2016
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. Mary Hilton's book serves as a corrective to these biases by culturally contextualising the popular educational ...
Contemporary Adolescent Literature and Culture: The Emergent Adult
1st Edition
Edited
By Maria Nikolajeva, Mary Hilton
October 10, 2016
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. Topics examined are adolescence and the natural world, nationhood and identity, the mapping of sexual awakening onto ...
Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850-1915
1st Edition
By Kristine Moruzi
September 09, 2016
Focusing on six popular British girls' periodicals, Kristine Moruzi explores the debate about the shifting nature of Victorian girlhood between 1850 and 1915. During an era of significant political, social, and economic change, girls' periodicals demonstrate the difficulties of fashioning a ...
Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices
1st Edition
By Jill Shefrin, Mary Hilton
September 09, 2016
Posing a challenge to more traditional approaches to the history of education, this interdisciplinary collection examines the complex web of beliefs and methods by which culture was transmitted to young people in the long eighteenth century. Expanding the definition of education exposes the shaky ...
The Child Savage, 1890–2010: From Comics to Games
1st Edition
Edited
By Elisabeth Wesseling
September 06, 2016
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, ...
Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction
1st Edition
Edited
By Sara K. Day, Miranda A. Green-Barteet, Amy L. Montz
August 26, 2016
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 ...