Beth Rodgers – författare

Since the publication of the first children's periodical in the 1750s, magazines have been an affordable and accessible way for children to read and form virtual communities. Despite the range of children's periodicals that exist, they have not been studied to the same extent as children's literature. The Edinburgh History of Children's Periodicals marks the first major history of magazines for young people from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. Bringing together periodicals from Britain, Ireland, North America, Australia, New Zealand and India, this book explores the roles of gender, race and national identity in the construction of children as readers and writers. It provides new insights both into how child readers shaped the magazines they read and how magazines have encouraged children to view themselves as political and world subjects.

The period covered in this volume witnessed the proliferation of print culture and the greater availability of periodicals for an increasingly diverse audience of women readers. This was also a significant period in women’s history, in which the ‘Woman Question’ dominated public debate, and writers and commentators from a range of perspectives engaged with ideas and ideals about womanhood ranging from the ‘Angel in the House’ to the New Woman.Essays in this collection gather together expertise from leading scholars as well as emerging new voices in order to produce sustained analysis of underexplored periodicals and authors and to reveal in new ways the dynamic and integral relationship between women’s history and print culture in Victorian society.

The period covered in this volume witnessed the proliferation of print culture and the greater availability of periodicals for an increasingly diverse audience of women readers. This was also a significant period in women's history, in which the 'Woman Question' dominated public debate, and writers and commentators from a range of perspectives engaged with ideas and ideals about womanhood ranging from the 'Angel in the House' to the New Woman.Essays in this collection gather together expertise from leading scholars as well as emerging new voices in order to produce sustained analysis of underexplored periodicals and authors and to reveal in new ways the dynamic and integral relationship between women's history and print culture in Victorian society.

This book examines the construction of adolescent girlhood across a range of genres in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

This book examines the construction of adolescent girlhood across a range of genres in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. It argues that there was a preoccupation with defining, characterising and naming adolescent girlhood at the fin de siècle. These ‘daughters of today’, ‘juvenile spinsters’ and ‘modern girls’, as the press variously termed them, occupying a borderland between childhood and womanhood, were seen to be inextricably connected to late nineteenth-century modernity: they were the products of changes taking place in education and employment and of the challenge to traditional conceptions of femininity presented by the Woman Question. The author argues that the shifting nature of the modern adolescent girl made her a malleable cultural figure, and a meeting point for many of the prevalent debates associated with fin-de-siècle society. By juxtaposing diverse material, from children’s books and girls’ magazines to New Woman novels and psychological studies, the author contextualises adolescent girlhood as a distinct but complex cultural category at the end of the nineteenth century.