The Girl&39s On Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830-1915 [Paperback]

Claudia Nelson (Editor)
CLAUDIA NELSON is a professor of English at Texas A&M University. She is author or editor of numerous books including Family Ties in Victorian England, The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915 (Georgia), and Little Strangers: Portrayals of Adoption in America, 1850–1929, which won the Children’s Literature Association award for the best scholarly book of the year.

Lynne Vallone (Editor)
LYNNE VALLONE is a professor of childhood studies and English at Rutgers University. She is the author or editor of numerous works including Disciplines of Virtue: Girls’ Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries and The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature.

The eleven contributors to The Girl’s Own explore British and American Victorian representations of the adolescent girl by drawing on such contemporary sources as conduct books, housekeeping manuals, periodicals, biographies, photographs, paintings, and educational treatises. The institutions, practices, and literatures discussed reveal the ways in which the Girl expressed her independence, as well as the ways in which she was presented and controlled. As the contributors note, nineteenth-century visions of girlhood were extremely ambiguous. The adolescent girl was a fascinating and troubling figure to Victorian commentators, especially in debates surrounding female sexuality and behavior.

The Girl’s Own combines literary and cultural history in its discussion of both British and American texts and practices. Among the topics addressed are the nineteenth-century attempt to link morality and diet; the making of heroines in biographies for girls; Lewis Carroll&rló+