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Luella D’Amico’s impetus for her collection, Girls’ Series Fiction in Popular Culture, is what she sees as the erasure of series fiction in scholarly circles. In this chronologically ordered group of essays, she aims to show that girls’ series fiction reflects and informs popular culture and girlhood in essence. The essays give diligent attention to its subjects and shed light on unexamined corners of the genre. What distinguishes this group of essays from previous similar studies, which are still rare, is the way that the essays converse with each other in unexpected ways. Not only do the readings here illuminate some unexplored or unstudied works, but D’Amico has included a dynamic and diverse breadth of authors and focuses, allowing for the similarities and complications between seemingly disparate works in this genre to bounce off of each other—the mark of a good collection and skillful editor. Scholars and students of children’s literature as well as cultural criticism, American history, childhood, and girlhood studies will find this collection useful and interesting.
The collection begins with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. In her essay, “Louisa May Alcott’s Theater of Time,” Marlowe Daly-Galeano examines both the ways that time defines the series genre and this series especially, in that it keeps readers waiting for the next installment, thus expanding the narrative and delaying its end. In serial fiction time it is both elastic and finite; while characters may stay the same age in a timeless world, their readers count on its extension to prolong the pleasure of reading and to delay closure. Motifs of performance and theater in Little Women—Alcott’s authorial narration of closing the curtains on certain chapters of the story, for example—make time itself an important element to the ways readers interact with the series. Building on this, Daly-Galeano explores how time and aging affect girls and women in particular, in the ways that the girls’ lives are prescribed based on expected milestones, for example, and anxieties surrounding women’s aging.
Time also intersects with change in “Queering the Katy Series: Disability, Emotion, and Imagination in the Novels of Susan Coolidge.” There, Eva Lupold complicates dominant scholarship on Susan Coolidge’s Katy series that reads Katy’s paralysis as a problematic taming of a spirited girl...