This collection of literary and historical criticism draws on recent scholarship on canon formation, gender studies, and cultural studies to show how concepts of public/private, male/female, and national/foreign operated in nineteenth-century children's literature, and explores how this literature transmitted hegemonic notions of American citizenship and cultural values.

Series Editor's Foreword

List of Figures

Introduction

Monika Elbert

1. Civic Duties and Moral Pitfalls

"A Just, A Useful Part": Lydia Huntley Sigourney and Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Contributions to The Juvenile Miscellany and The Youth's Companion

Lorinda B. Cohoon

Charitable (Mis)givings and the Aesthetics of Poverty in Louisa May Alcott's Christmas Stories

Monika Elbert

"Hints Dropped Here and There": Constructing Exclusion in St. Nicholas, Volume I

Melissa Fowler and Janet Gray

"One extra little girl": Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Orphans

Roxanne Harde

2. Politicizing Children: "Normalization" and the Place of the Marginalized Child

"A is an Abolitionist": The Anti-Slavery Alphabet and the Politics of Literacy

Martha Sledge

Overcoming Racism in Jacob Abbott's Stories of Rainbow and Lucky and in Antebellum America

Jeannette Barnes Lessels and Eric Sterling

"I am your slave for love": Race, Sentimentality, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Fiction for Children

Lesley Ginsberg

Shut-ins, Shut-outs, and Spofford's Other Children: The Hester Stanley Stories

Rita Bode

3. Sentimental and Realistic Constructs of Childhood

Robinson Crusoe and the Shaping of Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century America

Shawn Thomson

"the cleverest children's book written here": Elizabeth Stoddard's Lolly Dinks's Doings and the Subversion of Social Conventions

Maria Holmgren Troy

A Sentimental Childhood: The Unlikely Memoirs of Realist-Era Writers

Melanie Dawson

The Cultural Work of Kate Douglas Wiggin: Cultivating the Child's Garden

Anne Lundin

4. Education and Shifting Paradigms of the Child's Mind

"Heroes of the Laboratory and the Workshop": Invention and Technology in Books for Children, 1850-1990

Eric S. Hintz

Natural History for Children and the Agassiz Association

J.D. Stahl

Good Masters: Child-Animal Relationships in the Writings of Mark Twain and G. Stanley Hall

Joan Menefee

Child Consciousness in the American Novel: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), What Maisie Knew (1897), and the Birth of Child Psychology

Holly Blackford

Contributors

Bibliography

Index