In this pioneering work about the precursor to the comic book, Kelly Boyd traces the evolution of the boys' story paper and its impact on the imaginative world of working-class readers. From the penny dreadful and the Boy's Own Paper to the tales of Billy Bunter and Sexton Blake, this cultural form shaped ideas about gender, race, class and empire in response to social change. This study is an important analysis of a neglected part of popular culture.

Drawing on a wealth of illustrations form the original issues, and with engaging glimpses of board-room deliberations and office routine in earlier times, Jack Cox tells the paper's own story. He traces its history from the rattling adventures and bracing advice of the Victorian era to the practical hobbies and technical know-how of the post-War world, showing how it won the trust and love of the readers who will remember it with affection.

This book explores a central methodological issue at the heart of studies of the histories of children and childhood. It questions how we understand the perspectives of children in the past, and not just those of the adults who often defined and constrained the parameters of youthful lives. Drawing on a range of different sources, including institutional records, interviews, artwork, diaries, letters, memoirs, and objects, this interdisciplinary volume uncovers the voices of historical children, and discusses the challenges of situating these voices, and interpreting juvenile agency and desire. Divided into four sections, the book considers children's voices in different types of historical records, examining children's letters and correspondence, as well as multimedia texts such as film, advertising and art, along with oral histories, and institutional archives.

Euphoria swept Canada, and especially Ontario, with the outbreak of World War I. But why were people excited by the prospect of war? What popular attitudes about war had become ingrained in the society? This book examines the cult of manliness as it developed in Victorian and Edwardian Ontario, revealing a number of factors that fed the eagerness of youth to prove their mettle on the battlefields of Europe.

Much has been written regarding the New Woman in the fin de siècle and the changes women’s groups fought so hard to achieve. However, the social and gender changes demanded by women as the nineteenth century drew to a close necessitated a corresponding change in traditional masculinities. Redefinition of the male role was not easily negotiated in an era of rampant patriarchy and Victorian supremacy; the distinct boundaries between male and female social space made this increasingly problematic for both genders. Some Victorian men, who had seen the public sphere as exclusively theirs, felt both their masculinity and male privilege threatened and were confused by women’s challenges and their attempted encroachment into what had previously been perceived as solely male domains. While many female authors explored possibilities for the New Woman figure, as the fin de siècle approached, male authors began to consider how masculinities might respond to changing gender dynamics. Authors such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker, amongst others, addressed ways in which their male characters could negotiate a quandary of masculinities under threat by alterations to conventional gender spheres while remaining “manly” in situations which required a rethinking of many of their basic tenets during this time of flux. This book examines the opinions of women within both the dominant and reverse discourses, and parallels them with ideas surrounding changes in masculinities that began to emerge in male-authored texts. As such, it details an often vociferous negotiation of volatile issues which led to a major upheaval of gender roles in the approach to a new century that demanded changes which were difficult to achieve.

The School Story: Young Adult Narratives in the Age of Neoliberalism examines the work of contemporary writers, filmmakers, and critics who, reflecting on the realm of school experience, help to shape dominant ideas of school. The creations discussed are mostly stories for children and young adults. David Aitchison looks at serious novels for teens including Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak and Faiza Guène’s Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow, the light-hearted, middle-grade fiction of Andrew Clements and Tommy Greenwald, and Malala Yousafzai’s autobiography for young readers, I Am Malala. He also responds to stories that take young people as their primary subjects in such novels as Sapphire’s Push and films including Battle Royale and Cooties. Though ranging widely in their accounts of young life, such stories betray a mounting sense of crisis in education around the world, especially in terms of equity (the extent to which students from diverse backgrounds have fair chances of receiving quality education) and empowerment (the extent to which diverse students are encouraged to gain strength, confidence, and selfhood as learners). Drawing particular attention to the influence of neoliberal initiatives on school experience, this book considers what it means when learning and success are measured more and more by entrepreneurship, competitive individualism, and marketplace gains. Attentive to the ways in which power structures, institutional routines, school spaces, and social relations operate in the contemporary school story, The School Story offers provocative insights into a genre that speaks profoundly to the increasingly precarious position of education in the twenty-first century.