Beverly Lyon Clark and Margaret R. Higonnet bring together twenty-two scholars to look closely at the complexities of children's culture. Girls, Boys, Books, Toys asks questions about how the gender symbolism of children's culture is constructed and resisted. What happens when women rewrite (or illustrate) nursery rhymes, adventure stories, and fairy tales told by men? How do the socially scripted plots for boys and girls change through time and across cultures? Have critics been blind to what women write about -masculine- topics? Can animal tales or doll stories displace tired...

The popularity of the Harry Potter books among adults and the critical acclaim these young adult fantasies have received may seem like a novel literary phenomenon. In the nineteenth century, however, readers considered both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as works of literature equally for children and adults; only later was the former relegated to the category of -boys' books- while the latter, even as it was canonized, came frequently to be regarded as unsuitable for young readers. Adults--women and men--wept over Little Women. And America's most prestigious...

The hit Broadway show of 1912; the lost film of 1919; Katharine Hepburn, as Jo, sliding down a banister in George Cukor's 1933 movie; Mark English's shimmering 1967 illustrations; Jo--this time played by Sutton Foster--belting -I'll be / astonishing- in the 2004 Broadway musical flop: these are only some of the markers of the afterlife of Little Women.

Then there's the nineteenth-century child who wrote, -If you do not... make Laurie marry Beth, I will never read another of your books as long as I live.- Not to mention Miss Manners, a Little Women devotee, who...