First published in 1889, this novel has two main plots; one set in the real world at the time the book was published (the Victorian era), the other in the fictional world of Fairyland.

These essays document and examine the transformation of children's literature during the Romantic period, and trace Romanticism's influence on Victorian children's literature using a variety of critical approaches, including neo-historicist, feminist, mythic, reader-response, and formalist.

Animals, Museum Culture and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Curious Beasties explores the relationship between the zoological and palaeontological specimens brought back from around the world in the long nineteenth century—be they alive, stuffed or fossilised—and the development of children’s literature at this time. Children’s literature emerged as dizzying numbers of new species flooded into Britain with scientific expeditions, from giraffes and hippopotami to kangaroos, wombats, platypuses or sloths. As the book argues, late Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian children’s writers took part in the urge for mass education and presented the world and its curious creatures to children, often borrowing from their museum culture and its objects to map out that world. This original exploration illuminates how children’s literature dealt with the new ordering of the world, offering a unique viewpoint on the construction of science in the long nineteenth century.

Two fairy children have adventures in such plances as Dogland, Outland, and Elfland.

The first volume to consider childhood over eight centuries of British writing, this book traces the literary child from medieval to contemporary texts. Written by international experts, the volume's essays challenge earlier readings of childhood and offer fascinating contributions to the current upsurge of interest in constructions of childhood.

Bower of Books: Reading Children in Nineteenth-Century British Literature analyzes the history of the child as a textual subject, particularly in the British Victorian period. Nineteenth-century literature develops an association between the reader and the child, linking the humanistic self-fashioning catalyzed by textual study to the educational development of children. I explore the function of the reading and readable child subject in four key Victorian genres, the educational treatise, the Bildungsroman, the child fantasy novel, and the autobiography. I argue that the literate children of nineteenth century prose narrative assert control over their self-definition by creatively misreading and assertively rewriting the narratives generated by adults. The early induction of Victorian children into the symbolic register of language provides an opportunity for them to constitute themselves, not as ingenuous neophytes, but as the inheritors of literary history and tradition. The reading child's mind becomes an anthology, an inherited library of influences, quotations, and textual traditions that he or she reshapes with uniquely imaginative critical force. The first chapter examines the nineteenth-century British reception of John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Émile. I demonstrate that Locke's interest in cultivating skillful child readers, mediated through Rousseau's fictional pupil, informs Maria Edgeworth's Belinda and Walter Scott's Waverley. Lockean educational discourse, combined with Rousseauean fictional strategies, serves as foundational for the early nineteenth century development of the novel. Chapter Two addresses childhood reading in the English Bildungsroman, interrogating the relationship between child protagonists who develop their identities through creative misreading and the ways that novels of growth and development shape their readers. Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and Maggie Tulliver balance their absorption in the reading experience with their imaginative reshaping of their childhood reading, rewriting the books they encounter as they gradually learn to form themselves as subjects. Chapter Three traces the influence of children's books of natural history on the fantasy novels of Lewis Carroll and Charles Kingsley, with particular attention to the development of curiosity as a desirable trait for child readers. The child protagonists of natural history books, who serve as pedagogical models for child readers, inform the child protagonists of the fantasy novel, who model both successful reception of didactic instruction and comic failure to learn from their books. At the same time, the thematization of optical technology works together with the child's perspective to embed readerly experience in childhood perception. The final chapter turns to the autobiographical reflections of John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, and Edmund Gosse, investigating the metaphorical substitution of the acquisition of basic literacy for early childhood development and of canonical literacy for the development of identity over time. Each of these autobiographers defines himself through his ability to cultivate sublime readerly experience through re-reading. For Mill, the mature admiration that his father encourages in childhood reading must give way to a childish delight as an adult reader; for Gosse, his father's strict religious philosophy is displaced by his enchantment with the sound of poetic language; and for Ruskin, the ability to forget his childhood reading enables him to take the same pleasure in books over and over again.

Examination into how the new religious movement known as New Thought or "mind cure" influenced fin-de-siècle Anglophone children's fiction.

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 "playful literary citizenship," or some of the motivations inherent in later nineteenth and early twentieth century Anglo-American play pursuits as they relate to interest in shaping citizens through investment in "good" literature. Tracing play, as a societal and historical construct, as it surfaces time and again in children’s literary texts as well as children’s literary texts as they surface time and again in situations and environments of children’s play, this book underscores how play and literature are consistently deployed in tandem in attempts to create ideal citizens – even as those ideals varied greatly and were dependent on factors such as gender, ethnicity, colonial status, and class.

The academy may claim to seek and value diversity in its professoriate, but reports from faculty of color around the country make clear that departments and administrators discriminate in ways that range from unintentional to malignant. Stories abound of scholars--despite impressive records of publication, excellent teaching evaluations, and exemplary service to their universities--struggling on the tenure track. These stories, however, are rarely shared for public consumption. Written/Unwritten reveals that faculty of color often face two sets of rules when applying for reappointment, tenure, and promotion: those made explicit in handbooks and faculty orientations or determined by union contracts and those that operate beneath the surface. It is this second, unwritten set of rules that disproportionally affects faculty who are hired to "diversify" academic departments and then expected to meet ever-shifting requirements set by tenured colleagues and administrators. Patricia A. Matthew and her contributors reveal how these implicit processes undermine the quality of research and teaching in American colleges and universities. They also show what is possible when universities persist in their efforts to create a diverse and more equitable professorate. These narratives hold the academy accountable while providing a pragmatic view about how it might improve itself and how that improvement can extend to academic culture at large. The contributors and interviewees are Ariana E. Alexander, Marlon M. Bailey, Houston A. Baker Jr., Dionne Bensonsmith, Leslie Bow, Angie Chabram, Andreana Clay, Jane Chin Davidson, April L. Few-Demo, Eric Anthony Grollman, Carmen V. Harris, Rashida L. Harrison, Ayanna Jackson-Fowler, Roshanak Kheshti, Patricia A. Matthew, Fred Piercy, Deepa S. Reddy, Lisa Sanchez Gonzalez, Wilson Santos, Sarita Echavez See, Andrew J. Stremmel, Cheryl A. Wall, E. Frances White, Jennifer D. Williams, and Doctoral Candidate X.