This volume explores the relationship between representation, affect, and emotion in texts for children and young adults. It demonstrates how texts for young people function as tools for emotional socialisation, enculturation, and political persuasion. The collection provides an introduction to this emerging field and engages with the representation of emotions, ranging from shame, grief, and anguish to compassion and happiness, as psychological and embodied states and cultural constructs with ideological significance. It also explores the role of narrative empathy in relation to emotional socialisation and to the ethics of representation in relation to politics, social justice, and identity categories including gender, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality. Addressing a range of genres, including advice literature, novels, picture books, and film, this collection examines contemporary, historical, and canonical children's and young adult literature to highlight the variety of approaches to emotion and affect in these texts and to consider the ways in which these approaches offer new perspectives on these texts. The individual chapters apply a variety of theoretical approaches and perspectives, including cognitive poetics, narratology, and poststructuralism, to the analysis of affect and emotion in children's and young adult literature.

Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods explores the construction of the child and the development of texts for children in the nineteenth century through the application of fresh theoretical approaches and attention to aspects of literary childhoods that have only recently begun to be illuminated. This scope enables examination of the child in canonical nineteenth-century novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, and Thomas Hardy alongside well-known fiction intended for young readers by George MacDonald, Christabel Coleridge, and Kate Greenaway. The century was also distinctive for the rise of the children’s magazine, and this book broadens the definition of literary cultures to include magazines produced both by, and for, young people. The volume examines how the child and family are conceptualised, how children are positioned as readers in genres including the domestic novel, school story, Robinsonade, and fantasy fiction, how literary childhoods are written and politicised, and how childhood intersects with perceptions of animals and the natural environment. The range of chapters in this collection and the texts they consider demonstrates the variability and fluidity of literary cultures and nineteenth-century childhoods.

This book explores a central methodological issue at the heart of studies of the histories of children and childhood. It questions how we understand the perspectives of children in the past, and not just those of the adults who often defined and constrained the parameters of youthful lives. Drawing on a range of different sources, including institutional records, interviews, artwork, diaries, letters, memoirs, and objects, this interdisciplinary volume uncovers the voices of historical children, and discusses the challenges of situating these voices, and interpreting juvenile agency and desire. Divided into four sections, the book considers children's voices in different types of historical records, examining children's letters and correspondence, as well as multimedia texts such as film, advertising and art, along with oral histories, and institutional archives.

Expanding outward from previous scholarship on gender, queerness, and heteronormativity in children's literature, this book offers fresh insights into representations of sex and sexuality in texts for young people. In this collection, new and established scholars examine how fiction and non-fiction writing, picture books, film and television and graphic novels position young people in relation to ideologies around sexuality, sexual identity, and embodiment. This book questions how such texts communicate a sense of what is possible, impossible, taboo, or encouraged in terms of being sexual and sexual being. Each chapter is motivated by a set of important questions: How are representations of sex and sexuality depicted in texts for young people? How do these representations affect and shape the kinds of sexualities offered as models to young readers? And to what extent is sexual diversity acknowledged and represented across different narrative and aesthetic modes? This work brings together a diverse range of conceptual and theoretical approaches that are framed by the idea of sexual becoming: the manner in which texts for young people invite their readers to assess and potentially adopt ways of thinking and being in terms of sex and sexuality.

Expanding outward from previous scholarship on gender, queerness, and heteronormativity in children's literature, this book offers fresh insights into representations of sex and sexuality in texts for young people. In this collection, new and established scholars examine how fiction and non-fiction writing, picture books, film and television and graphic novels position young people in relation to ideologies around sexuality, sexual identity, and embodiment. This book questions how such texts communicate a sense of what is possible, impossible, taboo, or encouraged in terms of being sexual and sexual being. Each chapter is motivated by a set of important questions: How are representations of sex and sexuality depicted in texts for young people? How do these representations affect and shape the kinds of sexualities offered as models to young readers? And to what extent is sexual diversity acknowledged and represented across different narrative and aesthetic modes? This work brings together a diverse range of conceptual and theoretical approaches that are framed by the idea of sexual becoming: the manner in which texts for young people invite their readers to assess and potentially adopt ways of thinking and being in terms of sex and sexuality.

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 coherent, consistent model of girlhood. The mixed-genre format of these magazines, Moruzi suggests, allowed inconsistencies and tensions between competing feminine ideals to exist within the same publication. Adopting a case study approach, Moruzi shows that the Monthly Packet, the Girl of the Period Miscellany, the Girl's Own Paper, Atalanta, the Young Woman, and the Girl's Realm each attempted to define and refine a unique type of girl, particularly the religious girl, the 'Girl of the Period,' the healthy girl, the educated girl, the marrying girl, and the modern girl. These periodicals reflected the challenges of embracing the changing conditions of girls' lives while also attempting to maintain traditional feminine ideals of purity and morality. By analyzing the competing discourses within girls' periodicals, Moruzi's book demonstrates how they were able to frame feminine behaviour in ways that both reinforced and redefined the changing role of girls in nineteenth-century society while also allowing girl readers the opportunity to respond to these definitions.

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 coherent, consistent model of girlhood. The mixed-genre format of these magazines, Moruzi suggests, allowed inconsistencies and tensions between competing feminine ideals to exist within the same publication. Adopting a case study approach, Moruzi shows that the Monthly Packet, the Girl of the Period Miscellany, the Girl's Own Paper, Atalanta, the Young Woman, and the Girl's Realm each attempted to define and refine a unique type of girl, particularly the religious girl, the 'Girl of the Period,' the healthy girl, the educated girl, the marrying girl, and the modern girl. These periodicals reflected the challenges of embracing the changing conditions of girls' lives while also attempting to maintain traditional feminine ideals of purity and morality. By analyzing the competing discourses within girls' periodicals, Moruzi's book demonstrates how they were able to frame feminine behaviour in ways that both reinforced and redefined the changing role of girls in nineteenth-century society while also allowing girl readers the opportunity to respond to these definitions.

As part of the ongoing project of retrieving women writers from the margins of literary and cultural history, scholars of literature, history, and gender studies are increasingly exploring and interrogating girls' print culture. School stories, in particular, are generating substantial scholarly interest because of their centrality to the history of girls' reading, their engagement with cultural ideas about the education and socialization of girls, and their enduring popularity with book collectors. However, while serious scholars have begun to document the vast corpus of English-language girls' school stories, few scholarly editions or facsimile editions of these novels and short stories are readily available. Girls' School Stories in English, 1749-1929, a new title from Routledge and Edition Synapse's History of Feminism series, provides a vital resource to cater to this growing critical interest. This unique collection answers the important need to balance the historical record of canonical literature for young people in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century with popular fictions that had wide, devoted, and-following the emergence of school-series fiction-ongoing readerships. Moreover, existing scholarship has not yet explicated the connections between the British genre and its adaptation to colonial and American readerships, and one of the functions of this collection is to document the evolution of the girls' school-story genre in Britain to pinpoint the development and contestation of its signature tropes, and to trace the refinement and reproduction of these elements in Canadian, Australian, and American print cultures. The six volumes in the collection cover the years 1749 to 1929, a temporal span designed to demonstrate the origins of the genre and its development throughout the Victorian and Edwardian eras. It concludes with works from the 1920s that coincide with a peak in the genre's popularity. And the thematic, rather than chronological, organization of the set allows users easily to compare and contrast (across time and place) school-story conventions and attitudes with issues such as women's higher education. Volume I ('Moral Education') of the set draws attention to some of the earliest school stories published for girls in the eighteenth century, many of which situated moral improvement and rationality as the primary purpose of girls' education. Early stories, such as Dorothy Kilner's Anecdotes of a Boarding School; or, An Antidote to the Vices of those Establishments (1790), which is reproduced in full, were especially influenced by religious imperatives. While the overtly religious nature of these texts declined throughout the nineteenth century, the girls' school story continued to present a strong moral code based on honour and selflessness, which is shown in an excerpt from Canadian Ethel Hume Bennett's novel, Judy of York Hill (1922). The girls' school story is typically one of transformation, in which the protagonist learns to conform to the rules and codes of school life. Volume II ('The New Girl'), therefore, focuses on the generic conventions associated with a new student arriving at school, in which the girl does not initially understand or comply with the expectations of teachers and peers. While it presents examples that adhere to the model of successful transformation, this volume also reproduces some striking instances where this trope is subverted. It includes the full text of noted school-story author L. T. Meade's Wild Kitty (1897), which depicts a 'wild Irish girl' protagonist who is unable to be tamed by the English school environment, as well as a story from the Australasian Girls' Annual, 'Vic and the Refugee' (1916), in which the new girl is revealed to be a spy. Volume III ('Unruly Femininity') concentrates on girls who are disobedient, impulsive, or who are fun-loving 'madcaps'. It contains the full texts of Mary Hughes' The Rebellious Schoolgirl (1821), which is distinctive as one of the first sympathetic portrayals of a girl who has yet to understand and abide by the rules of the school, and Evelyn Sharp's The Making of a Schoolgirl (1897), which complicates some of the school-story tropes. Nonetheless, many of these school stories are heavily invested in defining a feminine ideal, as we see in a later short story, 'Teddy Versus Theodora' (1910). In addition to defining a feminine ideal, many schoolgirl heroines take their family and school responsibilities seriously, as markers of their desire to be good and to succeed academically. Volume IV ('Duty and Responsibility') demonstrates the ways in which girl heroines can have different expectations and attitudes towards their families, their studies, and their friends. The novel that is reproduced in full in this volume, Elsie Jeanette Oxenham's The Abbey Girls (1920), is the foundational text produced by one of the most popular writers of girls' school stories and was the basis for dozens of further books. It emphasizes the rewards that issue from sacrifice, with the heroine passing up a scholarship to allow her cousin to attend school, only to receive an inheritance at the novel's closure that allows her also to enrol at the school. A girl's responsibility to her country is particularly evident in an excerpt from Angela Brazil's The Patriotic Schoolgirl (1918), in which the students are encouraged to consider how they can help national war efforts. The formation of friendships and the pleasures of school life, such as sports and games, become hallmarks of the genre from the late nineteenth century. Volume V ('Friendships and Fun') exemplifies the enjoyable aspects of schoolgirl life that some protagonists metafictively describe reading about in school stories, but also provides examples of the way that relationships among girls can be infused with jealousy or hostility, such as in the excerpt from the 1874 Little Pansy: A Story of the School Life of a Minister's Orphan Daughter. Louise Mack's Teens: A Story of Australian Schoolgirls (1897), which is reproduced in full, is regarded as the first Australian school novel and focuses on the development, and testing, of a strong friendship between high-school girls Lennie and Mabel. The collection's final volume ( 'Higher Education and Women's Rights') demonstrates how the genre presented debates about women's suffrage and higher education to a girl readership. The college story replicated many school-story conventions, but also grappled with questions of family and public opposition to university education for women. This volume includes the complete novel, An American Girl, and Her Four Years in a Boys' College (1878) by Olive San Louie Anderson, a member of the first class of female students at the University of Michigan. As the genre was more prominent in the United States, two American college short stories are also reproduced, as well as extracts from a British example, L. T. Meade's A Sweet Girl Graduate (1891). School stories by their nature were largely supportive of girls' education but, nevertheless, in some of the extracts selected for this volume, they show ambivalence about issues such as women's suffrage. By making readily available materials which are currently very difficult for scholars, researchers, and students across the globe to locate and use, Girls' School Stories in English, 1749-1929 is a veritable treasure-trove. The gathered works are reproduced in facsimile, giving users a strong sense of immediacy to the texts and permitting citation to the original pagination. Each volume is also supplemented by substantial introductions, newly written by the editors, which contextualize the material. And with a detailed appendix providing data on the provenance of the gathered works, the collection is destined to be welcomed as a vital reference and research resource.

This collection is the first to focus exclusively on twenty-first-century young adult Gothic fiction. The essays demonstrate how the contemporary resurgence of the Gothic signals anxieties about (and hopes for) young people in the twenty-first century. Changing conceptions of young adults as liminal figures, operating between the modes of child and adult, can be mobilised when combined with Gothic spaces and concepts in texts for young people. In young adult Gothic literature, the crossing of boundaries typical of the Gothic is often motivated by a heterosexual romance plot, in which the human or monstrous female protagonist desires a boy who is not her 'type'. Additionally, as the Gothic works to define what it means to be human - particularly in relation to gender, race, and identity - the volume also examines how contemporary shifts and flashpoints in identity politics are being negotiated under the metaphoric cloak of monstrosity.

Through a comparison of Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand texts published between 1840 and 1940, From Colonial to Modern develops a new history of colonial girlhoods revealing how girlhood in each of these emerging nations reflects a unique political, social, and cultural context. Print culture was central to the definition, and redefinition, of colonial girlhood during this period of rapid change. Models of girlhood are shared between settler colonies and contain many similar attitudes towards family, the natural world, education, employment, modernity, and race, yet, as the authors argue, these texts also reveal different attitudes that emerged out of distinct colonial experiences. Unlike the imperial model representing the British ideal, the transnational girl is an adaptation of British imperial femininity and holds, for example, a unique perception of Indigenous culture and imperialism. Drawing on fiction, girls' magazines, and school magazine, the authors shine a light on neglected corners of the literary histories of these three nations and strengthen our knowledge of femininity in white settler colonies.