Lynne Vallone

Part biography, part historical and cultural study, this richly illustrated volume uncovers in fascinating detail the childhood that Princess Victoria actually lived. Vallone shows readers a new Victoria--a lively and passionate girl very different from the iconic, dour widow of the queen's later life. 50 illustrations, 15 in color.

Becoming Victoria

Julia Mickenberg

Remarkably well researched, the essays consider a wide range of texts - from the U.S., Britain and Canada - and take a variety fo theoretical approaches, including formalism and Marxism and those related to psychology, postcolonialism, reception, feminism, queer studies, and performance studies ... This collection pushes boundaries of genre, notions of childhood ... Choice. Back cover of book.

The Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature

Mary Ann O'Farrell

Explores notions of gender fantasy across time and culture, expanding the concept of virtuality to include people and events in history

Fantasies of Subjectivity and Embodiment

Virtual Gender

A groundbreaking work that explores human size as a distinctive cultural marker in Western thought Author, scholar, and editor Lynne Vallone has an international reputation in the field of child studies. In this analytical tour-de-force, she explores bodily size difference--particularly unusual bodies, big and small--as an overlooked yet crucial marker that informs human identity and culture. Exploring miniaturism, giganticism, obesity, and the lived experiences of actual big and small people, Vallone boldly addresses the uncomfortable implications of using physical measures to judge normalcy, goodness, gender identity, and beauty. This wide-ranging work surveys the lives and contexts of both real and imagined persons with extraordinary bodies from the seventeenth century to the present day through close examinations of art, literature, folklore, and cultural practices, as well as scientific and pseudo-scientific discourses. Generously illustrated and written in a lively and accessible style, Vallone's provocative study encourages readers to look with care at extraordinary bodies and the cultures that created, depicted, loved, and dominated them.

A Cultural History of Extraordinary Bodies

Big and Small

Claudia Nelson

The eleven contributors to The Girl's Own explore British and American Victorian representations of the adolescent girl by drawing on such contemporary sources as conduct books, housekeeping manuals, periodicals, biographies, photographs, paintings, and educational treatises. The institutions, practices, and literatures discussed reveal the ways in which the Girl expressed her independence, as well as the ways in which she was presented and controlled. As the contributors note, nineteenth-century visions of girlhood were extremely ambiguous. The adolescent girl was a fascinating and troubling figure to Victorian commentators, especially in debates surrounding female sexuality and behavior. The Girl's Own combines literary and cultural history in its discussion of both British and American texts and practices. Among the topics addressed are the nineteenth-century attempt to link morality and diet; the making of heroines in biographies for girls; Lewis Carroll's and John Millais's iconographies of girlhood in, respectively, their photographs and paintings; genre fiction for and by girls; and the effort to reincorporate teenage unwed mothers into the domestic life of Victorian America.

Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830-1915

The Girl's Own

A groundbreaking work that explores human size as a distinctive cultural marker in Western thought Author, scholar, and editor Lynne Vallone has an international reputation in the field of child studies. In this analytical tour-de-force, she explores bodily size difference—particularly unusual bodies, big and small—as an overlooked yet crucial marker that informs human identity and culture. Exploring miniaturism, giganticism, obesity, and the lived experiences of actual big and small people, Vallone boldly addresses the uncomfortable implications of using physical measures to judge normalcy, goodness, gender identity, and beauty. This wide-ranging work surveys the lives and contexts of both real and imagined persons with extraordinary bodies from the seventeenth century to the present day through close examinations of art, literature, folklore, and cultural practices, as well as scientific and pseudo-scientific discourses. Generously illustrated and written in a lively and accessible style, Vallone’s provocative study encourages readers to look with care at extraordinary bodies and the cultures that created, depicted, loved, and dominated them.

In British and American representations of girlhood during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, adolescent girls were viewed both as figures of adornment and as creatures in need of refuge, rescue, and reform. This engrossing book investigates such portrayals of girlhood by analyzing children's and adult's literature, conduct manuals, religious tracts, institutions for wayward girls, as well as social practices and phenomena, including the dowry system and the domestic science movement. Employing the methods of feminist theory and cultural studies, Lynne Vallone examines the historical and social production of girls' culture in Britain and America - from eighteenth-century English asylums for penitent prostitutes and rescue homes in late nineteenth-century America to such social and legal practices as marriage settlements in which the upper-class girl's "jewel" of chastity enhanced her bride-price. Vallone's study also brings new insights to a wide range of literature concerning female adolescence, offering in-depth readings of Pamela and Little Women, as well as works by Jane Austen, Frances Burney, Sarah Fielding, and Hannah More.

Lynne Vallone

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