| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Peter Stoneley. Consumerism and American Girls' Literature, 1860–1940. (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. x, 167. $55.00.
Peter Stoneley gives us a detailed look at girls' fiction, attempting to establish, in his words, why the figure of the "girl" came to "dominate the American imagination from the nineteenth century into the twentieth" (p. 1). He maintains that the middle-class girl provided a stable center within the chaos of advanced capitalism, and as such was "instrumental to articulating and assuaging the fear of social change" (p. 2). The social changes that he focuses on are the rise of consumerism, the interchange between country and city life, and issues of class, gender, race, and ethnicity.	1
Why isolate a study of such issues by gender, and why confine it to girls' fiction? Acknowledging that adult fiction also reflects these issues, Stoneley points to the greater popularity of girls' fiction. Because it was written in accessible language and reached such a large audience of readers (he notes that it was also read by adults), outselling other fiction by many times over, girls' fiction, he says, did more "cultural work" than other fiction (pp. 10–11). He maintains that his strongest motive for doing this study is that scholars have not previously recognized the "instrumentality" and "complexities" of the genre.	. . .

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