Girlhood Studies (Web); Guest Editor Ann Smith

Abstracts by 31 July 2016

Since the appearance of Stieg Larsson’s three novels all of which feature “The Girl” in its title, we have seen a plethora of books with similar titles. These range from Heidi Durrow’s award winning novel, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (2010), whose protagonist’s search for racial identity is complicated by her being a blue-eyed black girl thanks to her African American and white Danish parentage to The Girl With Three Legs: A Memoir (2011) by human rights activist and female genital mutilation survivor, Soraya Miré, in which this third leg is the soon to be amputated clitoris of a 13-year-old Somali girl, and from the controversial 2012 self e-published young adult novel by Kelly Thompson, The Girl Who Would Be King, about two super-powered teenagers, one good and one evil, to the 2015 bestseller, The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins’s thriller with its strange mixture of feminist sensibility and (seemingly unrecognized) misogyny in the depiction of its protagonist, Rachel.

For this themed issue of Girlhood Studies we welcome articles that explore how the representations of girls in written or graphic texts invite us to think about girlhood(s) from new and/or different perspectives. We have in mind such exploration in novels, novellas, short stories, and poems (whether canonically approved or not, whether traditional or contemporary, and whether or not subversive and/or experimental) picture books, comics and graphic novels, and so on. Read more and source … (Web)