The Edinburgh History of Children’s Periodicals

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.

Kristine Moruzi is Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Australia; author of Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850-1915 (2012); and co-author of From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature (1840-1940) (2018). Her interests span contemporary and historical children’s literature, with recent co-edited volumes including Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods (Palgrave, in-press), Sexuality in Literature for Children and Young Adults (Routledge, 2021), Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others (Univeristy of Wales Press, 2021), and Children’s Voices from the Past: New Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Palgrave, 2019). She is currently writing a monograph on children and charity in the periodical press in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Beth Rodgers is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK. She is the author of Adolescent Girlhood and Literary Culture at the Fin de Siècle: Daughters of Today (Palgrave, 2016), which received Special Mention in the University English Book Prize in 2017, and co-editor of Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s-1900s (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and Children’s Literature on the Move: Nations, Translations, Migrations (Four Courts, 2013). She has also published widely on the Irish author, L.T. Meade.

Michelle J. Smith is an Associate Professor in Literary Studies at Monash University, Australia. Her most recent monograph is Consuming Female Beauty: British Literature and Periodicals, 1840-1914 (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). In the field of children’s literature, she is the author of From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature, 1840-1940 (University of Toronto Press, 2018, with Clare Bradford and Kristine Moruzi) and Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls, 1880-1915 (Palgrave, 2011). Her co-edited collections include Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods (Palgrave, in press), Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others (University of Wales Press, 2021), Victorian Environments: Acclimatizing to Change in British Domestic and Colonial Culture (Palgrave, 2018), Affect, Emotion and Children’s Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults (Routledge, 2017), Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840-1950 (Palgrave, 2014), and Girls’ School Stories, 1749-1929 (Routledge, 2013).