"This is a sophisticated analysis basedon original research.""In addition to providing more detailed insight into the imperial worldviews promoted to nineteenth-century children, X Marks the Spot persuasively describes the agency of women writers on the front line of domestic imperialism." (Victorian Studies) "Norcia does not try to turn her writers into outspoken feminists; rather, she readily admits their complicity in the British imperial project and often in the perpetuation of their status as second-class citizens within the Empire. Her study is a well-researched, disciplined, and frank tracing of the primer writers' subtle—but nonetheless marked—resistance to the imperialist narrative of masculine, British power within the very genre that sought to package it so prettily for child readers." (Nineteenth Century Gender Studies)
