Serialized Citizenships: Periodicals, Books, and American Boys, 1840-1911 (review)

Cohoon's study is an especially nice treat for those scholars interested in serialized fiction of the nineteenth century, particularly in light of the care and attention she devotes to texts that often don't get the sort of careful analysis they deserve. These include the work of, among others, Jacob Abbot, George Light, Oliver Optic, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and Frances Hodgson Burnett, all of whom wrote for periodicals such as The Youth's Companion, The Young American's Magazine of Self-Improvement, and Boy's Life. Cohoon examines not only short fictional and educational pieces found in these periodicals, but also advertising materials and illustrations, along with longer novels published serially, including Optic's The Boat Club and Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy, both of which get their own chapters here. Her analyses of these two novels alone make her study worth a read, and her chapter on The Boat Club is perhaps the best in the book.

When discussing these texts Cohoon essentially advances two central points. First, she traces the complex interconnections between serialized fiction, boyhood, and citizenship. Cohoon suggests that the periodicals she explores not only presented a notion of boyhood that readers were encouraged to accept, but that those notions were intimately linked to productions of citizenship. She writes, "With regular monthly or weekly publications, the serialized constructions of boyhood located in periodicals provide readers with stage directions for accurately directing their bodies to perform as American boy citizens" (xx). Her introduction places this claim in the context of critical work by Kenneth Kidd, Michelle Foucault, and Judith Butler, among others. However, she is careful to resist grand narratives about boyhood and citizenship, or in any way to suggest that these texts worked to create a single, stable boy citizen; in fact much of her study is critical of the common "bad-boy" narrative originated by The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. She advocates instead for alternative histories of boyhood found in less canonical texts, such as Rollo at School or the ones mentioned above. She also turns her attention to the more "repeated attempts to define boyhood citizenships" (xvii) reflected in fluid and changing definitions of citizenship in different historical contexts.

In Jacob Abbot's contributions to The Youth's Companion, for instance, characters "frequently work to understand institutions and laws important to loyal citizens of the United States" (6) through educational settings in and out of the classroom. Cohoon argues that advertisements in the periodicals, particularly those advertising the interior of shops, "ask young readers to connect the images on the page to their lives and their parents' ability to purchase the advertised goods" (3–4). This "education about property joins other educatory content," she argues, where "boys are constructed as citizens within families, schools, towns, and nations," all of which "contribute to this citizen-shaping process" (25). On the other hand, during the 1840s, writings in The Young American's Magazine of Self-Improvement were directed more at urban working class boys, and emphasized above all else the importance of the "property of the self" (31). The writing celebrated the "intelligence necessary to run machinery" (32), and advocated for the improvement of the self through the recommended reading promoted by the periodical. Although such periodicals might be seen as potentially liberatory and subversive, Cohoon argues that such perpetual attention to the improvement of the self "perhaps relates to the presence in factories of rising numbers of adolescent men with unformed citizenship loyalties and potentially dangerous access to revolutionary ideas" (44).

Aldrich's Story of a Bad Boy in 1869, on the other hand, as well as material in the Our Young Folks periodical, constructed notions of boyhood and citizenship that were more in line with antebellum reconstruction. These texts championed more mischievous boyhoods than those mentioned above, but they were, she argues, more about "reconstructed national citizenships" that "mixes Northern and Southern conventions of boyhood to ultimately locate compromises between the two regional cultures; these regional...