Why did the figure of the girl come to dominate the American imagination from the middle of the nineteenth century into the twentieth? In Consumerism and American Girls' Literature Peter Stoneley looks at how women fictionalized for the girl reader the ways of achieving a powerful social and cultural presence. He explores why and how a scenario of 'buying into womanhood' became, between 1860 and 1940, one of the nation's central allegories, one of its favourite means of negotiating social change. From Jo March to Nancy Drew, girls' fiction operated in dynamic relation to consumerism, performing a series of otherwise awkward manoeuvres: between country and metropolis, uncouth and unspoilt, modern and anti-modern. Covering a wide range of works and authors, this book will be of interest to cultural and literary scholars alike.

Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature examines the preponderance of food imagery in nineteenth-century literary texts. Contributors to this volume analyze the social, political, and cultural implications of scenes involving food and dining and illustrate how "aesthetic" notions of culinary preparation are often undercut by the actual practices of cooking and eating. As contributors interrogate the values and meanings behind culinary discourses, they complicate commonplace notions about American identity and question the power structure behind food production and consumption.

A Cultural History of Shopping was a Library Journal Best in Reference selection for 2022. Shopping emerged as a special pleasure and problem during the period between the revolutionary upheavals of the late 18th century and the opening salvoes of the Great War. New shops, new products, new class and gender ideologies, new standards of comfort and hygiene, and rising living standards for some meant that people, especially women, spent more time shopping and engaging in consumer-oriented activities beyond the walls of the shop. At the same time, social commentators, local and national authorities, economists, and many husbands became concerned about the 'dangers' of shopping, believing that the department store was emancipating women and destroying society in the process. This volume explores shopping in the 19th century as a varied and embedded social, political, economic, and cultural activity. It draws out the continuities with earlier periods as well as examining how the department store came to be seen as both symbol and generator of profound economic, social, and cultural change. A Cultural History of Shopping in the Age of Revolution and Empire presents an overview of the period with themes addressing practices and processes; spaces and places; shoppers and identities; luxury and everyday; home and family; visual and literary representations; reputation, trust and credit; and governance, regulation and the state.

Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840-1950 explores a range of real and fictional colonial girlhood experiences from Jamaica, Mauritius, South Africa, India, New Zealand, Australia, England, Ireland, and Canada to reflect on the transitional state of girlhood between childhood and adulthood.

Girls' Series Fiction and American Popular Culture examines the ways in which young female heroines in American series fiction have undergone dramatic changes in the past 150 years, changes which have both reflected and modeled standards of behavior for America’s tweens and teen girls. Though series books are often derided for lacking in imagination and literary potency, that the majority of American girls have been exposed to girls’ series in some form, whether through books, television, or other media, suggests that this genre needs to be studied further and that the development of the heroines that girls read about have created an impact that is worthy of a fresh critical lens. Thus, this collection explores how series books have influenced and shaped popular American culture and, in doing so, girls’ everyday experiences from the mid nineteenth century until now. The collection interrogates the cultural work that is performed through the series genre, contemplating the messages these books relay about subjects including race, class, gender, education, family, romance, and friendship, and it examines the trajectory of girl fiction within such contexts as material culture, geopolitics, socioeconomics, and feminism.

In this provocative and original study, Robert E. Abrams argues that in mid-nineteenth-century American writing, new concepts of space and landscape emerge. Abrams explores the underlying frailty of a sense of place in American literature of this period. Sense of place, Abrams proposes, is culturally constructed. It is perceived through the lens of maps, ideas of nature, styles of painting, and other cultural frameworks that can contradict one another or change dramatically over time. Abrams contends that mid-century American writers ranging from Henry D. Thoreau to Margaret Fuller are especially sensitive to instability of sense of place across the span of American history, and that they are ultimately haunted by an underlying placelessness. Many books have explored the variety of aesthetic conventions and ideas that have influenced the American imagination of landscape, but this study introduces the idea of placeless into the discussion, and suggests that it has far-reaching consequences.

Tracing the segmentation of the literary marketplace in 19th century America, this book analyses the implications of the subdivided literary field for readers, writers, and literature itself.

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 ventures were assisting in the formation of a more ethical society. Children also provided necessary labor and raw material for industry. This diverse collection addresses the roles assigned to children in the context of nineteenth-century consumer culture, at the same time that it remains steadfast in recognizing that the young did not simply exist within adult-articulated cultural contexts but were agents in their formation. Topics include toys and middle-class childhood; boyhood and toy theater; child performers on the Victorian stage; gender, sexuality and consumerism; imperialism in adventure fiction; the idealization of childhood as a form of adult entertainment and self-flattery; the commercialization of orphans; and the economics behind formulations of child poverty. Together, the essays demonstrate the rising investment both children and adults made in commodities as sources of identity and human worth.

Remarkably well researched, the essays consider a wide range of texts - from the U.S., Britain and Canada - and take a variety fo theoretical approaches, including formalism and Marxism and those related to psychology, postcolonialism, reception, feminism, queer studies, and performance studies ... This collection pushes boundaries of genre, notions of childhood ... Choice. Back cover of book.

John D. Kerkering's study examines the literary history of racial and national identity in nineteenth-century America. Kerkering argues that writers such as DuBois, Lanier, Simms, and Scott used poetic effects to assert the distinctiveness of certain groups in a diffuse social landscape. Kerkering explores poetry's formal properties, its sound effects, as they intersect with the issues of race and nation. He shows how formal effects, ranging from meter and rhythm to alliteration and melody, provide these writers with evidence of a collective identity, whether national or racial. Through this shared reliance on formal literary effects, national and racial identities, Kerkering shows, are related elements of a single literary history. This is the story of how poetic effects helped to define national identities in Anglo-America as a step toward helping to define racial identities within the United States. This highly original study will command a wide audience of Americanists.