San Antonio College Library

"Alternating chapters of historical background and literary analysis, this study argues that postbellum series books inspired young women by illustrating the ways in which girls could participate in social change. The book adds to the existing scholarship on girls' culture by tracing the shifting social ideologies of girlhood throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries"--Provided by publisher.

"In Sisters, Schoolgirls, and Sleuths: Girls' Series Books in America, Carolyn Carpan provides a social history of girls' series fiction published in America from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twenty-first century."--Back cover.

In 1930 a plucky girl detective stepped out of her shiny blue roadster, dressed in a smart tweed suit. Eighty million books later, Nancy Drew has survived the Depression, World War II, and the sixties, and emerged as beloved by girls today as by their grandmothers. Rehak tells the behind-the-scenes history of Nancy and her groundbreaking creators. Both Nancy and her "author," Carolyn Keene, were invented by Edward Stratemeyer, who also created the...