This book focuses on girls and girlhoods, texts for and about girls, and the cultural contexts that shape girls' experience. It brings together scholars from girls' studies and children's literature, fields that have traditionally conducted their research separately, and the collaboration showcases the breadth and complexity of girl-related studies.

Contributors from disciplines such as sociology, literature, education, and gender studies combine these disciplinary approaches in novel ways with insights from international studies, postcolonial studies, game studies, and other fields. Several of the authors engage in activist and policy-development work around girls who experience poverty and marginalization. Each essay is concerned in one way or another with the politics of girlhood as they manifest in national and cultural contexts, in the everyday practices of girls, and in textual ideologies and agendas.

In contemporary Western societies girls and girlhood function to some degree as markers of cultural reproduction and change. The essays in this book proceed from the assumption that girls are active participants in the production of texts and cultural forms; they offer accounts of the diversity of girls' experience and complex significances of texts by, for, and about girls.

Clare Bradford is a professor of literary studies at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, where she teaches and researches mainly children's literature. Her 2001 book, Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children's Literature, won both the Children's Literature Association Book Award and the IRSCL Award of the International Research Society for Children's Literature. Clare Bradford's publications have appeared in Canadian Children's Literature, Children's Literature, The Lion and the Unicorn, Papers, and The Children's Literature Association Quarterly.

Mavis Reimer is Canada Research Chair in the Culture of Childhood, director of the Centre for Research in Young People's Texts and Cultures, and an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Winnipeg. She is co-author with Perry Nodelman of the third edition of The Pleasures of Children's Literature and editor of a collection of essays on Anne of Green Gables, entitled Such a Simple Little Tale.