Claudia Mitchell

Jacqueline Reid-Walsh

Investigates the increasingly complex relationships, struggles, obsessions, and idols of American tween and teen girls. From pre-school to high school and beyond, this work tackles many hot-button issues, including the barrage of advertising geared toward very young girls emphasizing sexuality and extreme thinness.

Girl Culture: Girl culture A to Z

Movable books are an innovative area of children’s publishing. Commonly equated with spectacular pop-ups, movable books have a little-known history as interactive, narrative media. Since they are hybrid artifacts consisting of words, images and movable components, they cross the borders between story, toy, and game. Interactive Books is a historical and comparative study of early movable books in relation to the children who engage with them. Jacqueline Reid-Walsh focuses on the period movable books became connected with children from the mid-17th to the early-19th centuries. In particular, she examines turn-up books, paper doll books, and related hybrid experiments like toy theaters and paignion (or domestic play set) produced between 1650 and 1830. Despite being popular in their own time, these artifacts are little known today. This study draws attention to a gap in our knowledge of children’s print culture by showing how these artifacts are important in their own right. Reid-Walsh combines archival research with children’s literature studies, book history, and juvenilia studies. By examining commercially produced and homemade examples, she explores the interrelations among children, interactive media, and historical participatory culture. By drawing on both Enlightenment thinkers and contemporary digital media theorists Interactive Books enables us to think critically about children’s media texts paper and digital, past and present.

Playful Media before Pop-Ups

Interactive Books

An encyclopedia that analyzes the interaction between girls and mainstream culture provides a series of essays examining girl culture and over two hundred and fifty alphabetically arranged articles examining aspects of that culture.

An Encyclopedia

Girl Culture

The tween is the «new girl on the block» in girlhood studies. Although the study of tween life may have derived from a particular marketing orientation at the end of the twentieth century, it is not limited by it. On the contrary, this collection of essays shows that «tween» is not a simple or unified concept, nor is it limited to a certain class of girls in a few countries. This collection by an international group of authors highlights specific methodologies for working with (and studying) tween-age girls, provides challenges to the presumed innocence of girlhood, and engages in an analysis of marketing in relation to girlhood. In so doing, this book offers a reading on these three or four years in a girl's life that suggests that this period is as fascinating as the teen years, and as generative in its implications for girlhood studies as studies of both younger and adolescent girls.

Tween Studies in the Culture of Girlhood

Seven Going on Seventeen

Girl Culture: An Encyclopedia investigates the increasingly complex relationships, struggles, obsessions, and idols of American tween and teen girls who are growing up faster today than ever before. Comprehensive in its coverage of the twenty and twenty-first century trendsetters, fashion, literature, film, in-group rituals and hot-button issues that shape-and are shaped by-girl culture, this two-volume resource offers a wealth of information to help students, educators, and interested readers better understand the ongoing interplay between girls and mainstream culture.

Jacqueline Reid-Walsh

Books

Your next favorite book is out there