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What Katy Read: Feminist Re-Readings of "Classic" Stories for Girls. Shirley Foster and Judy Simons. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995. 223 pp. $19.95 cloth.
This book is one example of the increasingly thoughtful studies of children's literature being produced in the 1990s. Gone are the days when the majority of writings about children's literature would be uncritical praise. Now, more and more critics are using a vast array of theoretical and cultural tools to study children's literature. Girls' fiction and culture has been the focus of a number of scholars who have produced influential studies, such as Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone's anthology The Girl's Own: Cultural Histories of the AngloAmerican Girl, 1830-1915 (1994) and Kimberly Reynolds' book Girls Only? Gender and Popular Children's Fiction in Britain, 1880-1910 (1989). What Katy Read is another noteworthy addition to contemporary scholarship on girls' fiction.
Foster and Simons' study is composed of nine chapters that examine a variety of well-known books for girls written from 1850 until 1920, including such works as Little Women, What Katy Did, The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables, and The Railway Children....