ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. The book offers eleven essays that draw on the intersecting fields of evangelicalism and childhood studies, specifically girlhood in North American literature. The essays in the book contribute to the critical conversations about the contested figure of the child, suggesting, along the way, the possibilities of such representations for housing "all sorts of queerness". The range of essays in the book, taken together, demonstrate the volatility and mobility of the individual subject's relation to power and demonstrate a complicated web of resistance to and endorsement of existing power arrangements. Pursuing such opportunities, the essays in the book offer a wide range of engagements with girlhood. Despite these distinctions, all the essays in the book contribute to the recovery project central to the field of nineteenth-century women's literature, and they do so, specifically, by foregrounding evangelicalism as a meaningful category for inquiry.
