Boys In Khaki Girls In Print

Generously illustrated, Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print is a scholarly yet accessible illumination of a hitherto untapped resource of women's writing and makes an important new contribution to the study of the literature of the Great War."--BOOK JACKET.

Generously illustrated, Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print is a scholarly yet accessible illumination of a hitherto untapped resource of women's writing and makes an important new contribution to the study of the literature of the Great War."--BOOK JACKET.

Jane Potter rediscovers the neglected literature of war. Romance novels and active service memoirs are the focus of this critical, yet accessible, study. Illustrated throughout, it demonstrates the ways in which popular literature played its role in both the entertainment and the reassurance of the nation.

This book focuses on girls and girlhoods, texts for and about girls, and the cultural contexts that shape girls’ experience. It brings together scholars from girls’ studies and children’s literature, fields that have traditionally conducted their research separately, and the collaboration showcases the breadth and complexity of girl-related studies. Contributors from disciplines such as sociology, literature, education, and gender studies combine these disciplinary approaches in novel ways with insights from international studies, postcolonial studies, game studies, and other fields. Several of the authors engage in activist and policy-development work around girls who experience poverty and marginalization. Each essay is concerned in one way or another with the politics of girlhood as they manifest in national and cultural contexts, in the everyday practices of girls, and in textual ideologies and agendas. In contemporary Western societies girls and girlhood function to some degree as markers of cultural reproduction and change. The essays in this book proceed from the assumption that girls are active participants in the production of texts and cultural forms; they offer accounts of the diversity of girls’ experience and complex significances of texts by, for, and about girls.

During World War I, as young men journeyed overseas to battle, American women maintained the home front by knitting, fundraising, and conserving supplies. These became daily chores for young girls, but many longed to be part of a larger, more glorious war effort--and some were. A new genre of young adult books entered the market, written specifically with the young girls of the war period in mind and demonstrating the wartime activities of women and girls all over the world. Through fiction, girls could catch spies, cross battlefields, man machine guns, and blow up bridges. These adventurous heroines were contemporary feminist role models, creating avenues of leadership for women and inspiring individualism and self-discovery. The work presented here analyzes the powerful messages in such literature, how it created awareness and grappled with the engagement of real girls in the United States and Allied war effort, and how it reflects their contemporaries' awareness of girls' importance.

In this collection the multidimensional story of children’s literature in the formative period of the long nineteenth century is illuminated, questioned, and, in some respects, rewritten. Children’s literature might be characterised as the love-child of the Enlightenment and the Romantic movements, and much of its history over the long nineteenth century shows it being defined, shaped, and co-opted by a variety of agents, each of whom has their own ambitions for it and for its child readership. Is children’s literature primarily a way of educating children in the principles of reason and morality? A celebration of the Rousseauesque child? A source of pleasure and entertainment? Women, both as writers and as nurturers involved at an intimate and daily level with the raising of children, recognised early and often very explicitly the multiple capacities of literature to provide entertainment, useful information, moral education and social training, and the occasionally conflicting nature of these functions. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

This volume uncovers the ideas concerning everyday life circulating in the burgeoning feminist periodical culture of Britain in the early twentieth century. Barbara Green explores the ways in which the feminist press used its correspondence columns, women’s pages, fashion columns and short fictions to display the quiet hum of everyday life that provided the backdrop to the more dramatic events of feminist activism such as street marches or protests. Positioning itself at the interface of periodical studies and everyday life studies, Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life illuminates the more elusive aspects of the periodical archive through a study of those periodical forms that are particularly well-suited to conveying the mundane. Feminist journalists such as Rebecca West, Teresa Billington-Greig, E. M. Delafield and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence provided new ways of conceptualizing the significance of domestic life and imagining new possibilities for daily routines. /p>

Because all wars in the twenty-first century are potentially global wars, the centenary of the first global war is the occasion for reflection. This volume offers an unprecedented account of the lives, stories, letters, games, schools, institutions (such as the Boy Scouts and YMCA), and toys of children in Europe, North America, and the Global South during the First World War and surrounding years. By engaging with developments in Children’s Literature, War Studies, and Education, and mining newly available archival resources (including letters written by children), the contributors to this volume demonstrate how perceptions of childhood changed in the period. Children who had been constructed as Romantic innocents playing safely in secure gardens were transformed into socially responsible children actively committing themselves to the war effort. In order to foreground cross-cultural connections across what had been perceived as ‘enemy’ lines, perspectives on German, American, British, Australian, and Canadian children’s literature and culture are situated so that they work in conversation with each other. The multidisciplinary, multinational range of contributors to this volume make it distinctive and a particularly valuable contribution to emerging studies on the impact of war on the lives of children.