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
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
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.
The Seventh International Literary Juvenilia Conference
This conference will be held at UNSW Sydney from Wednesday 18 May to Saturday 21 May 2022.
Following the success of the 2018 conference on ‘Minority Voices’ at St. John’s College, University of Durham, the International Society of Literary Juvenilia (ISLJ) and Juvenilia Press, welcome you to UNSW Sydney for a conference to discuss:
Literary Juvenilia, material imagination and ‘things’
Young writers ranging from Pope, Chatterton and Burns in the eighteenth century, to Austen, the Brontës, Eliot and Dickens in the nineteenth, and Edith Wharton, C.S. Lewis, Judith Wright, Margaret Atwood, and J.K. Rowling in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have found inspiration and example in the everyday context of their writing practice—in a materiality related to their physical, social and cultural worlds and in the material conditions of their play, learning, imitation and critique. This conference will explore the material culture of juvenilia (youthful writing up to the age of twenty): the relationship between ‘things’ and literary imagination and practice.
The conference aims to provide a broad intellectual forum for academics, postgraduates, members of literary societies and the interested public.
There will be a panel dedicated to the juvenilia of the Brontës, especially that of Anne Brontë to acknowledge her 2020 Bicentenary, sponsored by the Australian Brontë Association.
Visit the conference website
