The central premise of this book is that childrens reading was and continues to be critical to the shaping of a childs subjectivity. Drawing on the work of Foucault and Said, the book offers an incisive account of the rise of childrens reading in Britain and its implications for the working class movement in the nineteenth century. It analyzes nineteenth century adventure fiction for boys to show how structurally complicit genres such as anthropological, missionary and travel writing shaped the idea of Africa in these novels. Analyzing the novels of G. A. Henty and H. Rider Haggard in...