The Place of Girls in the Traditions of Minstrelsy and Recitation

Abstract

Children's literature criticism has been enhanced by classic and recent work that considers and analyses the important roles children play in performance, but there is a gap in current scholarship on drama as children's literature. This gap concerns how the place of children – especially girls and notions of girlhood – has changed over time in texts and cultural productions around the traditions of recitation and minstrelsy. 1 Robin Bernstein has argued persuasively that the ‘scripts’ of a racist past inform the cultural constructions of the present and that children's material and popular culture is often its repository: ‘Sentimentalism or minstrelsy may have peaked in the lives of adults in the nineteenth century, but the popular cultures of childhood … delivered, in fragmented and distorted forms, the images, practices, and ideologies of sentimentalism and minstrelsy well into the twentieth century’ (7). This essay attempts to bridge this gap in scholarship by investigating late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglo-American black and white girlhood through readings of recitation pieces and playtexts, important aspects of children's literary culture, broadly conceived