In this study, Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson argue that the Victorians created a concept of adolescence that lasted into the twentieth century and yet is strikingly at odds with post-Second World War notions of adolescence as a period of "storm and stress." In the enormously popular "juvenile" literature of the period, primarily boys’ and girls’ own adventure and school stories, adolescence is acknowledged as a time of sexual awareness and yet also of a romantic idealism that is lost with marriage, a time when boys and girls acquire adult duties and responsibilities and yet have not had to assume the roles of breadwinner or household manager. The book reveals a concept of adolescence as significant as the Romantic cult of childhood that preceded it, which will be of interest to scholars of both children’s literature and Victorian culture.

In this study, Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson argue that the Victorians created a concept of adolescence that lasted into the twentieth century and yet is strikingly at odds with post-Second World War notions of adolescence as a period of "storm and stress." In the enormously popular "juvenile" literature of the period, primarily boys’ and girls’ own adventure and school stories, adolescence is acknowledged as a time of sexual awareness and yet also of a romantic idealism that is lost with marriage, a time when boys and girls acquire adult duties and responsibilities and yet have not had to assume the roles of breadwinner or household manager. The book reveals a concept of adolescence as significant as the Romantic cult of childhood that preceded it, which will be of interest to scholars of both children’s literature and Victorian culture.

In a period of ongoing debate about faith, identity, migration and culture, this timely study explores the often politicised nature of constructions of one of Britain’s longest standing minority communities. Representations in children’s literature influenced by the impact of the Enlightenment, the Empire, the Holocaust and 9/11 reveal an ongoing concern with establishing, maintaining or problematising the boundaries between Jews and Gentiles. Chapters on gender, refugees, multiculturalism and historical fiction argue that literature for young people demonstrates that the position of Jews in Britain has been ambivalent, and that this ambivalence has persisted to a surprising degree in view of the dramatic socio-cultural changes that have taken place over two centuries. Wide-ranging in scope and interdisciplinary in approach, Jews and Jewishness in British Children’s Literature discusses over one hundred texts ranging from picture books to young adult fiction and realism to fantasy. Madelyn Travis examines rare eighteenth- and nineteenth-century material plus works by authors including Maria Edgeworth, E. Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, Richmal Crompton, Lynne Reid Banks, Michael Rosen and others. The study also draws on Travis’s previously unpublished interviews with authors including Adele Geras, Eva Ibbotson, Ann Jungman and Judith Kerr.

This book maps the development of the boy detective in British children’s literature from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. It explores how this liminal figure – a boy operating within a man’s world – addresses adult anxieties about boyhood and the boy’s transition to manhood. It investigates the literary, social and ideological significance of a vast array of popular detective narratives appearing in ‘penny dreadfuls’ and story papers which were aimed primarily at working-class boys. This study charts the relationship between developments in the representation of the fictional boy detective and changing expectations of and attitudes towards real-life British boys during a period where the boy’s role in the future of the Empire was a key concern. It emphasises the value of the early fictional boy detective as an ideological tool to condition boy readers to fulfil adult desires and expectations of what boyhood and, in the future, proper manhood should entail. It will be of particular importance to scholars working in the fields of children’s literature, crime fiction and popular culture.

In The Classics and Children's Literature between West and East a team of contributors from different continents offers a survey of the reception of Classical Antiquity in children’s and young adults’ literature by applying regional perspectives.

Europe was in turmoil during the first half of the twentieth century. The political stability that emanated from nineteenth-century political liberalism began to break down, reaching climaxes in the Great War, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War. Revolutions in Russia and Spain threatened parliamentary governments, and the Armenian genocide that began in 1915 foreshadowed the systematic destruction of European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. Dictators seized power and established authoritarian regimes that stymied democratic expression and censored the press. Much of the scholarship on each of the conflicts has tended to focus on the military (male) and the civilian (female) binary. Women and children experienced every conflict during this tumultuous period as civilians, consumers, victims, exiles, and combatants. As histories of women and war suggest, there are exciting new areas of research and scholarship that resist simplistic binaries. Women were not simply civilians or victims. They were actors in the minutiae of wars, revolutions, dictatorships, and genocides. Children were present in these conflicts and not invisible, as many histories suggest. They too were actors and often politicized by propagandist literature and sectarian education through their own experiences and the politics of their families. This collection seeks to complicate the child/ adult distinction and examine the experiences of women and children as lenses to view a more collective face of conflict. While the volume brings to attention conflicts in Europe, the editors acknowledge the global ramifications of the revolutions, wars, and genocides, as well as the multitude of individual experiences. This collection seeks to expand understanding of the personal as the political in European conflicts from 1900-1950. We believe the focus on women and children offers a diverse perspective on five tumultuous decades of European history.

This book explores the phenomenon of the story paper, the meanings and values children took from their reading, and the responses of adults to their reading choices. It argues for the revaluing of the story paper in the inter-war years, giving the genre a pivotal role in the development of children's literature.

This edited collection is the first to address the topic of adolescence in Irish history. It brings together established and emerging scholars to examine the experience of Irish young adults from the 'affective revolution' of the early nineteenth century to the emergence of the teenager in the 1960s.

This book examines the construction of adolescent girlhood across a range of genres in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. It argues that there was a preoccupation with defining, characterising and naming adolescent girlhood at the fin de siècle. These ‘daughters of today’, ‘juvenile spinsters’ and ‘modern girls’, as the press variously termed them, occupying a borderland between childhood and womanhood, were seen to be inextricably connected to late nineteenth-century modernity: they were the products of changes taking place in education and employment and of the challenge to traditional conceptions of femininity presented by the Woman Question. The author argues that the shifting nature of the modern adolescent girl made her a malleable cultural figure, and a meeting point for many of the prevalent debates associated with fin-de-siècle society. By juxtaposing diverse material, from children’s books and girls’ magazines to New Woman novels and psychological studies, the author contextualises adolescent girlhood as a distinct but complex cultural category at the end of the nineteenth century.

This book offers a historical analysis of key classical translated works for children, such as writings by Hans Christian Andersen and Grimms’ tales. Translations dominate the earliest history of texts written for children in English, and stories translated from other languages have continued to shape its course to the present day. Lathey traces the role of the translator and the impact of translations on the history of English-language children’s literature from the ninth century onwards. Discussions of popular texts in each era reveal fluctuations in the reception of translated children’s texts, as well as instances of cultural mediation by translators and editors. Abridgement, adaptation, and alteration by translators have often been viewed in a negative light, yet a closer examination of historical translators’ prefaces reveals a far more varied picture than that of faceless conduits or wilful censors. From William Caxton’s dedication of his translated History of Jason to young Prince Edward in 1477 (‘to thentent/he may begynne to lerne read Englissh’), to Edgar Taylor’s justification of the first translation into English of Grimms’ tales as a means of promoting children’s imaginations in an age of reason, translators have recorded in prefaces and other writings their didactic, religious, aesthetic, financial, and even political purposes for translating children’s texts.