Colonial Girls’ Literature and the Politics of Archives in the Digital Age

The history of colonial children’s literature is intriguingly complex. Most of the books and magazines that colonial children read, by both British and colonial authors, were produced in London and then shipped to the colonies. Yet alongside these texts are others that were written and published in the colonies themselves, only occasionally making their way back to the metropole. Some colonial novels for young people remain well known, like Mary Grant Bruce’s Billabong series or L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. But what of the many other texts, the ones that were published in Canada, in Australia, in New Zealand, and seem to have disappeared from the history of children’s literature? Attempts to recover this history are complicated by the canonisation of particular children’s texts, a process that narrows the definition of the field to texts popularised by the academy through teaching and research. Moreover, historical children’s literature can be difficult to make accessible to scholars and students because many of the texts are out of print, which may have contributed to the under-representation of certain texts in undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Critical editions of historical children's literature tend to concentrate on frequently taught texts, which reinforces those texts as the most interesting and important in the field.