Carol J. Singley (Associate Professor of English) has co-edited with Caroline Levander of Rice University, a book of critical essays entitled The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader.

The book includes her co-authored introduction, which describes the child as site of critical inquiry and explains how narratives of U.S. national identity are persistently configured in the language of childhood and family. Using a range of critical methodologies, contributors to the book address matters of race, gender, and family to chart the ways in which representations of the child typify historical periods and conflicting ideas.

Grounded in the literary, the volume also draws on other disciplines, revealing that the concepts of "the child" are not isolated artifacts but cultural productions that in turn affect the social climates around them. Essayists look at games, pets, adolescent sexuality, adoption, and other family relations to reveal the complex ways in which the child operates as a rich vehicle for writers to consider evolving ideas of nation and the diverse roles of citizens in it.

For more information, or to purchase this book, please visit the Rutgers University Press web site: http://165.230.98.36/acatalog/__The_American_Child_1228.html#1807

Update on Carol Singley's current projects:

Her article, “Words for Children,” is forthcoming in A Companion to American Fiction, 1780-1865. Ed. Shirley Samuels. Blackwell Publishers.

An internationally known Edith Wharton scholar, Dr. Singley is presently at work on a book analyzing representations of adoption in American literature and culture.

Carol Singley’s work on adoption in literature continues with a presentation she made on “Teaching Adoption Fiction” at the Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Convention in Pittsburgh, March 2004.

For more information, please contact Dr. Carol Singley at singley@camden.rutgers.edu