Victorian Alphabet Books and the Education of the Eye shows how the familiar genre went beyond mere reading instruction to offer nineteenth-century British writers, illustrators, and publishers a site for representing and re-thinking literacy itself. This interdisciplinary study traces how individuals throughout the Victorian era deployed alphabet books to promote visual literacy or oral culture as a vital complement to textual literacy. Their strategies ranged from puns and political allusions to elaborate designs that addressed adult audiences alongside or even instead of children. As the format became more familiar in the first part of Victoria's reign, George Cruikshank, William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry Cole, and Edward Lear were quick to recognize its critical potential. This history pivots around the mid-1860s and 1870s, when the production of illustrated alphabet books exploded thanks to evolving printing technology and national education reform. Case studies of individual works and makers show how a revolution in picture books reflected and responded to laws assuring children's access to schooling. On the one hand, Socialist artist Walter Crane was able to develop alphabetical illustration from a utilitarian mid-century product into an aesthetically rich, yet accessibly priced "education of the eye." On the other hand, Kate Greenaway, Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), and their publishers tended to leverage commercialized nostalgia against pedagogy. This survey concludes by showing how market-oriented trends and the development of photographic reproduction toward the end of the century fed into interpretations of the alphabet, including works by Rudyard Kipling and Hilaire Belloc, that reflected growing ambivalence about industrialized print culture.

This wide-ranging and innovative collection of essays addresses important issues in cultural studies and the history of the book. Multidisciplinary in approach, the essays consider different aspects of the production, circulation, and consumption of printed texts throughout the nineteenth century. Topics studied include market trends, modes of publication, the use of pseudonyms by women writers, readerships and reading ideologies, and copyright law; and the book examines a wide range of printed materials, from valentines, advertisements, illustrations, and fashionable annuals, to the more traditional literary genres of poetry, fiction and periodical essays. The authors under discussion include Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, Meredith, and Walter Pater. Contributors draw on speech-act, reader-response, and gender theory in addition to various historical, narratological, materialist, and bibliographical perspectives.

In its seventh edition, "Through the Eyes of a Child: An Introduction to Children's Literature" continues to be a visually stunning, theoretically sound, comprehensive overview of children's literature. It focuses squarely on selecting and evaluating quality literature to share with children and guiding them to appreciate and respond to that literature. This edition features multicultural literature and young adult literature in every chapter, expanded coverage of biographies and informational books and over 100 new children's titles referenced throughout. A children's literature CD-ROM accompanies the book and contains bibliographic information for thousands of titles, making it even easier to share quality literature with children and adolescents.

“A powerful opener to a series [that] will produce a combination of feisty protagonists and challenging circumstances to thoroughly involve not just young adults, but adult fantasy fans who seek epic stories fueled by powerful friendships and adversaries.” --Midwest Book Review (Diane Donovan) (re A Throne for Sisters) “Morgan Rice's imagination is limitless!” --Books and Movie Reviews (re A Throne for Sisters) From #1 Bestselling author Morgan Rice comes a new series for fantasy and middle grade readers (and adults, too)! Fans of Harry Potter and Percy Jackson—look no further! In THE SCEPTER OF FIRE: OLIVER BLUE AND THE SCHOOL FOR SEERS (BOOK FOUR), 12 year old Oliver Blue is dispatched on an urgent mission to save The School for Seers. He must travel back in time, to Florence, 1592, to find the only artifact that can save them all. Yet the secret is guarded by none other than Galileo himself. As Oliver searches for one of the great scientists and inventors of all time, the man who invented the telescope and who discovered planets, Oliver must wonder: is a he a seer, too? And what other secrets is he holding? His brother Chris, more powerful than ever, remains determined to kill Oliver for all time. Oliver soon realizes it is a race against time, as the fate of the school—and of the world—is at stake. An uplifting fantasy, THE SCEPTER OF FIRE is book #4 in a riveting new series filled with magic, love, humor, heartbreak, tragedy, destiny, and a string of shocking surprises. It will make you fall in love with OLIVER BLUE, and keep you turning pages late into the night. “The beginnings of something remarkable are there.” --San Francisco Book Review (re A Quest of Heroes)

First published in 1985, this book explores the social history of the Irish in Britain across a variety of cities, including Bristol, York, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Stockport. With contributions from foremost scholars in the field, it provides a thorough critical study of Irish immigration, in its social, political, cultural and religious dimensions. This book will be of interested to students of Victorian history, Irish history and the history of minorities.

This book offers a spatial history of the decades in which women entered the universities as students for the first time. Through focusing on several different types of spaces – such as learning spaces, leisure spaces, and commuting spaces – it argues that the nuances and realities of everyday life for both men and women students during this period can be found in the physical environments in which this education took place, as declaring women eligible for admittance and degrees did not automatically usher in coeducation on equal terms. It posits that the intersection of gender and space played an integral role in shaping the physical and social landscape of higher education in England and Wales in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, whether explicitly – as epitomised by the building of single-sex colleges – or implicitly, through assumed behavioural norms and practices.