My Books

 I am the author and editor of 8 academic books about children's literature and Victorian literature.

Consuming Female Beauty: British Literature and Periodicals, 1840-1914. Edinburgh UP, 2022. 

"In this innovative work, Michelle J. Smith sheds new light on the rise of the beauty industry in Great Britain from 1840 to 1914. To illuminate this rich history, she examines a wealth of hitherto overlooked sources, including advertisements, novels, women's magazines, juvenile periodicals and beauty manuals. The first study of its kind,　Consuming Female Beauty promises to transform scholarly understanding of gender, beauty and print culture during the Victorian era and beyond."
– Alexis Easley, University of St. Thomas



From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children's Literature, 1940-1940. University of Toronto Press, 2018.

"From Colonial to Modern examines a century of books and magazine pieces for British colonial girls. Reclaiming material overlooked by scholars, Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi, and Clare Bradford describe the continuities and discontinuities within the print culture of Empire, particularly regarding the construction of girlhood and nation through a variety of axes including race, work, education, nature, the family, the Great War, and modernity."
–  Claudia Nelson, Professor, Department of English, Texas A&M University

Podcast about the book for the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth.

Empire in British Girls' Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls, 1880-1915. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 

Winner of the ESSE Prize for Best First Book (Literatures in English)

While the gender and age of the girl may seem to remove her from any significant contribution to empire, this book provides both a new perspective on familiar girls' literature, and the first detailed examination of lesser-known fiction relating the emergence of fictional girl adventurers, castaways and 'ripping' schoolgirls to the British Empire.




EDITED BOOKS

Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others. Ed. Michelle J. Smith and Kristine Moruzi. University of Wales Press, 2021.

"This collection is a valuable contribution to discussions of Gothic fiction for young people. Its innovative, engaging essays address the intersections of the Gothic with genre, youth culture, spatiality, textual consumption, gender, and considerations of what it is to be human."
–  Professor Emerita Clare Bradford FAHA, Deakin University

“This timely volume traces the ways in which myriad anxieties of being on the verge of adulthood in contemporary culture are given form in young adult Gothic texts. Paying particular attention to how the genre traverses boundaries, it reimagines the relations between power and oppression for teen characters and readers through the deployment of humour and horror, creative and corrective revisions of traditional tales, and alternate understandings of monstrosity, space, gender, and other-than-human beings.”  –  Professor Karen Coats, Director of the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature, University of Cambridge

Victorian Environments: Acclimatizing to Change in British Domestic and Colonial Culture. Ed. Grace Moore and Michelle J. Smith. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

“The essays in this book … are all engaging and well written. … A strength of this collection is the contribution it makes to readings of colonial Australian environments, but its broad scope means there will be something for most scholars working on the topics of Victorian nature and the environment. ”
– Cheryl Blake Price, The Wilkie Collins Journal




Affect, Emotion and Children’s Literature:  Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults. Ed. Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith and Elizabeth Bullen. Routledge, 2017.
"What has been needed is a key text that readers can depend on to give them an overview of the potential of the ‘affective turn’ in theory – and this edited collection fills that gap."
– David Rudd, Director of NCRCL, University of Roehampton, UK

"Within the context of children’s culture, Affect, Emotion, and Children’s Literature offers scholars a sophisticated synthesis of those cognitive theories involved with emotions and how they are deployed. The essays in this volume demonstrate how children and teenagers learn emotionology through the texts they experience—and even more important, these essays provide clear evidence of the important role children’s literature can play in providing data for researchers interested in the connection between children, their reading, and emotional development." – Roberta Seelinger Trites, English, Illinois State University, USA

Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840-1950. Ed. Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J. Smith. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 

"A groundbreaking collection of essays on girlhood and girls'experiences in colonies throughout the British Empire, Colonial Girlhood covers sources, parts of the world, and cross-cultural experiences that will interest scholars of literature, history, film, cultural studies, women's studies and postcolonial issues. In addition, it should make an appealing classroom text."
– Sally Mitchell, Emerita Professor of English and Women's Studies, Temple University, USA




Girls' School Stories, 1749-1929. Ed. Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J. Smith. Routledge, 2013. 6 volumes.

This unique collection answers the important need to balance the historical record of canonical literature for young people in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century with popular fictions that had wide, devoted, and—following the emergence of school-series fiction—ongoing readerships. Moreover, existing scholarship has not yet explicated the connections between the British genre and its adaptation to colonial and American readerships, and one of the functions of this collection is to document the evolution of the girls’ school-story genre in Britain to pinpoint the development and contestation of its signature tropes, and to trace the refinement and reproduction of these elements in Canadian, Australian, and American print cultures.


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