The Girl’s Own Paper, founded in 1880, both shaped and reflected tensions between traditional domestic ideologies of the period and New Woman values in the context of the figure of the New Girl. These selections from the journal demonstrate the efforts of its publisher (the Religious Tract Society) to combat the negative moral influence of sensational popular literature while at the same time addressing the desires of its audience for exciting reading material and information about topics mothers could not or would not discuss. Selected fiction gives a rich sense of the conventions and the domestic ideology of the time; the nonfiction prose ranges from essays on conduct and household management to articles on new opportunities in education and work.

Nineteenth-century British periodicals for girls and women offer a wealth of material to understand how girls and women fit into their social and cultural worlds, of which music making was an important part. The Girl's Own Paper, first published in 1880, stands out because of its rich musical content. Keeping practical usefulness as a research tool and as a guide to further reading in mind, Judith Barger has catalogued the musical content found in the weekly and later monthly issues during the magazine's first thirty years, in music scores, instalments of serialized fiction about musicians, music-related nonfiction, poetry with a musical title or theme, illustrations depicting music making and replies to musical correspondents. The book's introductory chapter reveals how content in The Girl's Own Paper changed over time to reflect a shift in women's music making from a female accomplishment to an increasingly professional role within the discipline, using 'the piano girl' as a case study. A comparison with musical content found in The Boy's Own Paper over the same time span offers additional insight into musical content chosen for the girls' magazine. A user's guide precedes the chronological annotated catalogue; the indexes that follow reveal the magazine's diversity of approach to the subject of music.

This essay collection develops new perspectives on constructions of old age in literary, legal, scientific and periodical cultures of the nineteenth century. Rigorously interdisciplinary, the book places leading researchers of old age in nineteenth-century literature in dialogue with experts from the fields of cultural, legal and social history. It revisits the origins of many modern debates about aging in the nineteenth century – a period that saw the emergence of cultural and scientific frameworks for the understanding of old age that continue to be influential today. The contributors provide fresh readings of canonical texts by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and others. The volume builds momentum in the burgeoning field of aging studies. It argues that the study of old age in the nineteenth century has entered a new and distinctly interdisciplinary phase that is characterized by a set of research interests that are currently shared across a range of disciplines and that explore conceptions of old age in the nineteenth century by privileging, respectively, questions of agency, of place, of gender and sexuality, and of narrative and aesthetic form.

Internationalism in Children's Series brings together international children's literature scholars who interpret 'internationalism' through various cultural, historical and theoretical lenses. From imperialism to transnationalism, from Tom Swift to Harry Potter, this book addresses the unique ability of series to introduce children to the world.

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.

Drawing from and reworking Gothic conventions, the New Woman version is marshaled during a tumultuous cultural moment of gender anxiety either to defend or revile the complex character. The controversial and compelling figure of the New Woman in fin de siècle British fiction has garnered extensive scholarly attention, but rarely has she been investigated through the lens of the Gothic. Part I, “The Blurred Boundary,” examines an obfuscated distinction between the New Woman and the prostitute, presented in a stunning breadth and array of writings. Part II, “Reconfigured Conventions,” probes four key aspects of the Gothic, each of which is reshaped to reflect the exigencies of the fin de siècle. In Part III, “Villainous Characters,” the bad father of Romantic fiction is bifurcated into the husband and the mother, both of whom cause great suffering to the protagonist.