Girls’ Series Fiction and Popular Culture by Luella D’Amico (review)

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 into a properly domesticated woman. Lupold shows how Katy’s disability opens up possibilities for the girl and for readers. If the disabled body, and the female body, is abjected from the mainstream, disability “allows for the queering of traditional norms and the development of character” (38).

Other essays show the ways that girls’ series registered changes in attitudes toward girls and labor in the early twentieth century. Christiane Farnan’s analysis of The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew looks at how the hardworking Polly Pepper, “wanted” and admired by family, employers, and peers, could serve as a model for readers to negotiate and garner value through “girl labor” in a patriarchal capitalism. Paige Gray’s article on L. Frank Baum’s series, Oz and the Aunt Jane books (published as Edith Van Dyne), demonstrates correlations between the evolution of the female journalist and Baum’s girl protagonists. In particular, she links women’s roles in the public sphere with the normalization and simultaneous novelty of “girl talk” that is made popular in series fiction for girls (72). Similarly, Linda Simon looks at the independent Cherry Ames, teenage nurse, in her paper “Cherry Ames: A New Woman for the 1940s.” These essays strike a balance between mere praise of the works as feminist triumphs and nuanced studies with historical context.

Nancy Drew’s monolithic presence in series fiction is touched upon in fresh ways, as in Michael Cornelius’s “Nancy Drew’s Shadow,” which looks at the mystery-solving Trixie Belden, a less polished and thus more relatable descendent of Nancy. Carolyn Cocca, in “The Bob-Whites of the Belden-Wheeler Detective Agency,” submits that while the Trixie Belden series...