Reissuing works originally published between 1981 and 2000 this set offers an outstanding small collection of scholarship. It includes volumes on Victorian fiction for children, boys school stories, heroes in children s literature, boyhood and children s literature as art and how criticism developed for the genre."

Originally published in 1991. Focusing on boys' own literature, this book examines the reasons why such a distinct type of combative masculinity developed during the heyday of the British Empire. This book reveals the motives that produced this obsessive focus on boyhood. In Victorian Britain many kinds of writing, from the popular juvenile weeklies to parliamentary reports, celebrated boys of all classes as the heroes of their day. Fighting fit, morally upright, and proudly patriotic - these adventurous young men were set forth on imperial missions, civilizing a savage world. Such noble...

Originally published in 1981. Many of the classics of children s literature were produced in the Victorian period. But "Alice in Wonderland" and "The King of the Golden River" were not the books offered to the majority of children of the time. When writing for children began to be taken seriously, it was not as an art, but as an instrument of moral suasion, practical instruction, Christian propaganda or social control.

This book describes and evaluates this body of literature. It places the books in the economic and social contexts of their writing and publication, and considers many of...

Originally published in 1985. This is a fascinating account of the life cycle of a minor literary genre, the boys school story. It discusses early nineteenth-century precursors of the school story didactic works with such revealing titles as "The Parents Assistant" and goes on to examine in detail the two major examples of the genre - Hughes s "Tom Brown s School Days" and Farrar s "Eric." The slow development of the genre during the 1860s and 1870s is traced, and its institutionalisation by Talbot Baines Reed in, for example, "The Fifth Form at St Dominic s," is described.

Many similar...

Originally published in 1996. A detailed analysis of the art of children's literature covering world literature for children, children's literature as a canonical art form, the history of children's literature from a semiotic perspective, and epic, polyphony, chronotope, intertextuality, and metafiction in children's literature.