Our goal is to assemble an accessible collection of literary and visual juvenilia that illuminates the rich possibilities of considering carefully works created by young people – a resource for scholars, teachers, and students. The growing field of juvenilia studies explores how a focus on the cultural productions of childhood and youth recasts cultural and social history, both thematically and in terms of modes of publication, reception, and ideas of imagination, authorship, and creative agency. A juvenilia studies approach recovers not only young writers who were active and influential in their times but also those who remained unpublished, whose neglected perspectives expand and challenge our understanding of the role of demographic, social, and cultural factors in meaning-making.
We are particularly interested in works by young people, published and unpublished, canonical writers and unknown creators, that are not widely available through print or online editions. We are committed to showcasing the rich variety of work created in English by young people of all nations and backgrounds. While the early work of those who later found success in literature and art is always of interest, we also hope to include juvenilia that is meaningful in other ways – for example, as texts that engage with particular historical or cultural moments; as playful experimentations in form, style, or genre; or as means to understand childhood and youth in full, complex ways across time and place. Due to the challenges of obtaining copyright for more contemporary texts, we will begin by focusing on texts published in or before 1928, with the hope of expanding our work in the future. Right now, we are limiting the anthology to literary and visual juvenilia, but the support of COVE’s increasingly robust digital tools might help us expand to other media.