Books

Animating the Victorians

Animating the Victorians: Disney’s Literary History (U of Mississippi Press, 2025) explores the connections between a literary period and a global multimedia corporation. I trace Disney’s adaptations of Victorian texts like Alice in Wonderland, Oliver Twist, Treasure Island, Peter Pan, and the tales of Hans Christian Andersen from initial concept to theatrical release and beyond to the sequels, consumer products, and theme park attractions that make up a Disney franchise. I draw on on preproduction reports, press releases, and unfinished drafts (including materials in the Walt Disney Company Archives, some of which have not yet been discussed in print) to show how Disney’s writers engaged not just with the texts themselves but with the contexts in which they were written, their authors’ biographies, and intervening adaptations. Reviewed in: Between Disney (blog);

British Children’s Literature of the 19th Century

British Children’s Literature of the 19th Century: A Companion (McFarland, 2025), the first comprehensive reference work about the Golden Age of children’s literature and the emergence of juvenile literature as a major publishing phenomenon. Alphabetical entries include key concepts like boyhood and girlhood, juvenile periodicals, and imperialism; foundational figures like Sarah Trimmer, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Martha Sherwood; new genres like the moral tale, religious fiction, children’s poetry, and school stories; prolific authors like Hesba Stretton, L. T. Meade, and G. A. Henty; and major figures like Lewis Carroll, J. M. Barrie, and Frances Hodgson Burnett. Reviewed in: Library Journal;

The Legacy of the Moral Tale

The Legacy of the Moral Tale: Children’s Literature and the English Novel, 1744-1859 (University of Tennessee Press, 2016)

My first book (which is based on my PhD dissertation) documents the importance of children’s tales to the history of the novel. After tracing the origins of the moral tale from the mid-eighteenth century into the Romantic period, I show how Victorian writers like Charles Dickens incorporated the conventions of these tales into their own fictions. The Victorians grew up reading moral tales, and that childhood reading helps explain the imitative, didactic relationship that many Victorian novelists aim to create with their readers. The book has been reviewed in The Victorian Web, Studies in the Novel, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Modern Philology.