About the Press
The Books
Each volume of the Juvenilia Press series, besides the text by the young author, includes light-hearted illustration, scholarly annotation, and an introduction that relates this work to the author's mature writing. Students both graduate and undergraduate contribute largely to this series, working under the direction of established specialists in the area.
"An ingenious scholarly and pedagogical undertaking." - G.B. Tennyson, Nineteenth-Century Literature
The General Editor
Christine Alexander, Scientia Professor in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, is a prominent Australian editor and writer on the Brontës, including their juvenilia. Her critical study on The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë (1983) won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize; and she has edited a multi-volume Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë, and other Brontë editions. She is co-author of The Art of the Brontës (1995), and The Oxford Companion to the Brontës (2003), and Celebrating Charlotte Bronte: Transforming Life into literature in ‘Jane Eyre’ for the Brontë Bicentenary (2016).
Together with the Founder and former General Editor of the Juvenilia Press, Professor Juliet McMaster from the University of Alberta, Canada, she has edited The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf (2005). She has also edited The Brontës: Tales of Glass Town, Angria and Gondal: Selected Early Writings (2010), Jane Austen's Love and Freindship and other Youth Writings (2014, pb 2015), and a number of Juvenilia Press editions with postgraduate students.
The Juvenilia Press is an international initiative hosted by the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, UNSW.
Scholarship and the Press
Juvenilia Press publications are scholarly volumes that receive full credit in universities as academic publications in assessments of grant reporting. Not only are they peer-reviewed by international specialists in relevant fields of expertise, but they are also reviewed in scholarly journals, such as Nineteenth-Century Literature, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Canadian Children's Literature, Text, Canadian Studies in English, and Romantic Studies. We have received recognition for our editing work in the Times Literary Supplement, where in a front-page review on Alexander and McMaster the reviewer (Professor Dinah Birch) speaks of "the quiet work of the Juvenilia Press" (TLS, 10 February 2006, p. 3). It is "quiet" because we do not advertise in the usual way or make money from our publications, apart from covering costs. Juvenilia Press is hosted by universities (in Canada and Australia to date) and supported by research grants.
Pedagogy and the Press
Christine Alexander & Melissa Carr.
The Juvenilia Press was originally conceived as a university/classroom project. While it has grown well beyond those limits, pedagogy remains at the core of its mandate. Students are involved in every volume in some capacity, whether that be writing introductions, researching annotations, learning the importance of textual editing, drawing illustrations, or developing a book's layout and design. Working under the guidance of established international scholars, they gain invaluable experience, practical skills, and publication.
See Involving Students to read some comments from former student editors and artists, and to see samples of their work. Click on News & Events to see student editors and photos from Book Launches and Conferences.
The Origins of the Press
Reflections of a former Student: "Thrills and Other Benefits" of Juvenilia Press
Read former Student's Reflection