Girls, Texts, Cultures Available for Pre-Order

Fri. Jan. 3, 2014

Girls, Texts, Cultures, a volume initiated by a symposium hosted by the Centre for Research in Young People’s Texts and Cultures, is now available for pre-order through Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Edited by Clare Bradford and Mavis Reimer, this book focuses on girls and girlhoods, texts for and about girls, and the cultural contexts that shape girls’ experience. It brings together scholars from girls’ studies and children’s literature, fields that have traditionally conducted their research separately, and the collaboration showcases the breadth and complexity of girl-related studies.

Contributors from disciplines such as sociology, literature, education, and gender studies combine these disciplinary approaches in novel ways with insights from international studies, postcolonial studies, game studies, and other fields. Several of the authors engage in activist and policy-development work around girls who experience poverty and marginalization. Each essay is concerned in one way or another with the politics of girlhood as they manifest in national and cultural contexts, in the everyday practices of girls, and in textual ideologies and agendas.

In contemporary Western societies girls and girlhood function to some degree as markers of cultural reproduction and change. The essays in this book proceed from the assumption that girls are active participants in the production of texts and cultural forms; they offer accounts of the diversity of girls’ experience and complex significances of texts by, for, and about girls.

Clare Bradford is a professor of literary studies at Deakin University, Melbourne. She has published over seventy essays on children’s literature. Her books include Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature (WLU Press, 2007) and New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature: Utopian Transformations (2009). In 2009 she was awarded the first International Trudeau Fellowship.

Mavis Reimer is a Canada Research Chair in Young People’s Texts and Cultures and a professor of English at the University of Winnipeg, where she is also the Dean of Graduate Studies. She is lead editor of the scholarly journal Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures and co-author, with Perry Nodelman, of The Pleasures of Children’s Literature (3rd ed., 2003).