Goody Two Shoes And Other 18th Century British Stories

Short stories, as this anthology demonstrates, can help just as much, if not more, than novels and poems, to get a sense of the 18th century. They feature the same adventures of the body, the mind, or the soul that one finds in Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, or Tristram Shandy. The first collection of its kind: forty-seven 18th-century British short stories, some of which have never before been anthologized, in an annotated and illustrated edition.

John Newbery is celebrated as the first successful publisher of children's books, and the founder of modern children's literature. Three classic works published by Newbery (the authors unknown) are now available for a new generation of readers. Edited by M. O. Grenby, with an introduction, explanatory notes and suggestions for further reading.

John Newbery is celebrated as the first successful publisher of children's books, and the founder of modern children's literature. Three classic works published by Newbery (the authors unknown) are now available for a new generation of readers. Edited by M. O. Grenby, with an introduction, explanatory notes and suggestions for further reading.

The contemporary popular cultural space has leveraged the queer in the same format of representation as its presentation in the 1990s. Although the queer is portrayed in a less perverse light than a decade ago, popular cultural representations of the queer in the visual culture genres are still on the level of the banal. While popular culture has become more encouraging towards the queer, the broader cultural opinion about the queer has been progressively more skeptical, compromised by the idea that the queer is encroaching on spaces reserved exclusively for heteronormative recreation. The essays in this volume look closely at how the queer is portrayed across media and throughout the world.

The present monograph looks closely at and identifies a new subgenre, histopias. A (late) postmodernist phenomenon, histopias are fictional retellings of the history of the world. They often use utopian/dystopian scenarios, which are necessary as “world-historical effect”: the end and/or rebirth of the world offer the possibility of narrating the fate of all mankind. Whether novelists or playwrights, histopian authors use a structural pattern that mirrors the way in which the world tells itself: both continuous and discontinuous, in turn linear, cyclical, or radial.

Many scholars have written about eighteenth-century English novels, but no one really knows who read them. This study provides historical data on the provincial reading publics for various forms of fiction - novels, plays, chapbooks, children's books, and magazines. Archival records of Midland booksellers based in five market towns and selling printed matter to over thirty-three hundred customers between 1744 and 1807 form the basis for new information about who actually bought and borrowed different kinds of fiction in eighteenth-century provincial England. This book thus offers the first solid demographic information about actual readership in eighteenth-century provincial England, not only about the class, profession, age, and sex of readers but also about the market of available fiction from which they made their choices - and some speculation about why they made the choices they did. Contrary to received ideas, men in the provinces were the principal customers for eighteenth-century novels, including those written by women. Provincial customers preferred to buy rather than borrow fiction, and women preferred plays and novels written by women - women's works would have done better had women been the principal consumers. That is, demand for fiction (written by both men and women) was about equal for the first five years, but afterward the demand for women's works declined. Both men and women preferred novels with identifiable authors to anonymous ones, however, and both boys and men were able to cross gender lines in their reading. Goody Two-Shoes was one of the more popular children's books among Rugby schoolboys, and men read the Lady's Magazine. These and other findings will alter the way scholars look at the fiction of the period, the questions asked, and the histories told of it.

Since the publication of the first children's periodical in the 1750s, magazines have been an affordable and accessible way for children to read and form virtual communities. Despite the range of children's periodicals that exist, they have not been studied to the same extent as children's literature. The Edinburgh History of Children's Periodicals marks the first major history of magazines for young people from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. Bringing together periodicals from Britain, Ireland, North America, Australia, New Zealand and India, this book explores the roles of gender, race and national identity in the construction of children as readers and writers. It provides new insights both into how child readers shaped the magazines they read and how magazines have encouraged children to view themselves as political and world subjects.

Children's literature is a rapidly expanding field of research which presents students and researchers with a number of practical and intellectual challenges. This research handbook is the first devoted to the specialist skills and complexities of studying children's literature at university level. Bringing together the expertise of leading international scholars, it combines practical advice with in-depth discussion of critical approaches. Wide- ranging in approach, Children's Literature Studies: A Research Handbook: - Considers 'children's literature' in its fullest sense, examining visual texts (such as picturebooks), films, computer games and other 'transformed' texts, as well as more traditional modes of writing for children - Offers a step-by-step guide to devising, starting and carrying out a research project (such as a dissertation or thesis), and advice on what kinds of research it is possible and profitable to undertake - Surveys the different methodologies and theoretical approaches used by children's literature scholars - Includes case studies, questions and exercises to reinforce ideas discussed in each chapter - Provides lists of further reading and a specialist glossary that will remain a useful reference resource This handbook will be an essential companion for those studying children's literature, whether as undergraduates, postgraduates, or beyond.