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.
Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Childhood and the Politics of Play
1st Edition
By Michelle Beissel Heath
December 12, 2019
Drawing evidence from transatlantic literary texts of childhood as well as from nineteenth and early twentieth century children’s and family card, board, and parlor games and games manuals, Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Childhood and the Politics of Play aims to reveal what might be thought of as ...
Reinventing Childhood Nostalgia: Books, Toys, and Contemporary Media Culture
1st Edition
Edited
By Elisabeth Wesseling
December 12, 2019
While Romantic-era concepts of childhood nostalgia have been understood as the desire to retrieve the ephemeral mindset of the child, this collection proposes that the emergence of digital media has altered this reflective gesture towards the past. No longer is childhood nostalgia reliant on ...
Space and Place in Children�s Literature, 1789 to the Present
1st Edition
By Maria Sachiko Cecire, Hannah Field, Malini Roy
December 12, 2019
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. The collection is comprised of four sections that take ...
The Aesthetics of Children's Poetry: A Study of Children's Verse in English
1st Edition
Edited
By Katherine Wakely-Mulroney, Louise Joy
December 12, 2019
This collection gives sustained attention to the literary dimensions of children’s poetry from the eighteenth century to the present. While reasserting the importance of well-known voices, such as those of Isaac Watts, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, A. A. Milne, and Carol Ann ...
Nordic Childhoods 1700�1960: From Folk Beliefs to Pippi Longstocking
1st Edition
Edited
By Reidar Aasgaard, Marcia Bunge, Merethe Roos
December 10, 2019
This volume strengthens interest and research in the fields of both Childhood Studies and Nordic Studies by exploring conceptions of children and childhood in the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden). Although some books have been written about the history of childhood ...
Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Childhood in Contemporary Britain: Literature, Media and Society
1st Edition
Edited
By Sandra Dinter, Ralf Schneider
December 10, 2019
In the light of the complex demographic shifts associated with late modernity and the impetus of neo-liberal politics, childhood continues all the more to operate as a repository for the articulation of diverse social and cultural anxieties. Since the Thatcher years, juvenile delinquency, child ...
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 ...
Creating Religious Childhoods in Anglo-World and British Colonial Contexts, 1800-1950
1st Edition
Edited
By Hugh Morrison, Mary Clare Martin
January 17, 2019
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. It builds on emerging scholarship that challenges the view that religion had a solely negative impact ...
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 ...