Transforming Girls : The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence

These mid-nineteenth-century novels focus on female adolescence as a social category in unexpected ways. They draw not on a twentieth-century model of the alienated adolescent, but on a model of collaborative growth. The purpose of these novels is to approach adolescence--a category that continues to engage and perplex us--from another perspective, one in which fluid identity and the deliberate construction of a self are celebrated. They provide alternatives to cultural beliefs about what it was like to be a white, middle-class girl in the nineteenth century and challenge the assumption that the evolution of the girls'' book is always a movement towards less sexist, less restrictive images of girls.

Drawing on forgotten bestsellers in the United States and Germany (where this genre is referred to as Backfischliteratur), Transforming Girls offers insightful readings that call scholars to reexamine the history of the girls'' book. It also outlines an alternate model for imagining adolescence and supporting adolescent girls. The awkward adolescent girl--so popular in mid-nineteenth-century fiction for girls--remains a valuable resource for understanding contemporary girls and stories about them.