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.
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 ...
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 ...