Contemporary Children's Literature and Film: Engaging with Theory
Edited by Clare Bradford and Kerry Mallan

Bringing together leading and emerging scholars this book argues for the significance of theory for reading texts written and produced for young people. Integrating perspectives from across feminism, ecocriticism, postcolonialism and poststructuralism, it demonstrates how these inform approaches to a range of contemporary literature and film.

Includes chapters by Kerry Mallan, Clare Bradford, Elizabeth Bullen and John Stephens.

Empire in British Girls' Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls,
1880-1915, Michelle J. Smith

The first book-length study of girlhood and empire in Victorian and Edwardian print culture. Redressing the neglect of popular girls' texts, it relates the emergence of fictional girl adventurers, castaways and 'ripping' schoolgirls to the British Empire. It provides both a new perspective on familiar girls' literature, such as the Girl's Own Paper and the novels of E. Nesbit and Frances Hodgson Burnett, and the first detailed examination of lesser known fiction, such as girls' robinsonades, the novels of Bessie Marchant and Angela Brazil, and the first Girl Guide Handbook. This book shows how imperial concerns not only informed the way in which girls were imagined as mothers and civilisers at home in Britain, but also as colonial settlers, nurses and explorers, on whom the very future of the Empire depended.