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9781496836267

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"Pfeiffer's book is a compelling study about a subgenre of girls' literature oft overlooked. . . . The Backfisch book ultimately ascertains women and girls had a significant place in history, and Pfeiffer shows there was, and still is, a consumer need for these stories.--Emma K. McNamara ""International Research in Children's Literature"" Pfeiffer provides excellent resources and in-depth analysis of eight novels, both German and American, of this little-known, understudied genre, making this book a vital addition to the study of girls' literature. Essential.--D. V. Dominguez ""CHOICE"" Pfeiffer's book is a dense, discursive and thoroughly researched argument for a better way of approaching adolescence. . .it is also a persuasive thesis on the work of rearing girls that, ideally, could change attitudes not only to adolescence but to the adolescent we all carry within us.--Katharine England ""Magpies"" By situating the backfisch into a backdrop of well-established texts and critical lenses, Pfeiffer gently but insistently asks scholars to reconsider many of the critical assumptions our understandings of adolescent and nineteenth-century literature have been built upon.--Ivy Stabell, associate professor of English at Iona College Transforming Girls is a remarkable example of scholarship that points to new ways of understanding girls' books and adolescence in fiction, as well as contemporary adolescents more generally.--Morgan Foster ""The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth"" Pfeiffer's beautifully-written Transforming Girls cracks open the canon of the girls' book to present the neglected German-American Backfisch book as a vibrant genre focused on active, well-mentored adolescent girl protagonists. It presents an alternative, fluid model of adolescent girlhood within the nineteenth-century United States and emphasizes womanhood as a transformational process requiring hard work and perseverance. Perhaps most significantly, Transforming Girls provides a model both for examining neglected genres, and for the scholarly willingness to research and write against academic narratives we perceive as set or standard.--Amanda K. Allen ""International Journa lof Young Adult Literature"" Transforming Girls has the potential to shift the way we think about girlhood reading and adolescence while carving out a different kind of conceptual space for adolescent girls--one that fosters growth while embracing the 'messiness' of the transition to adulthood.--Sarah Wadsworth, author of In the Company of Books: Literature and Its ""Classes"" in Nineteenth-Century America"

Transforming Girls has the potential to shift the way we think about girlhood reading and adolescence while carving out a different kind of conceptual space for adolescent girls-one that fosters growth while embracing the 'messiness' of the transition to adulthood. By situating the backfisch into a backdrop of well-established texts and critical lenses, Pfeiffer gently but insistently asks scholars to reconsider many of the critical assumptions our understandings of adolescent and nineteenth-century literature have been built upon.

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Julie Pfeiffer is professor of English at Hollins University. She is editor of Children’s Literature, the annual of the Children’s Literature Association.

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