Perhaps it is more obvious in the present day, surrounded as we are by cell phones and other electronic devices transmitting information and messages in images and words instantaneously, but for over a hundred years the lives of girls—middle class girls in particular—have been mediated to a large extent by the plethora of texts that surround them. Th ese texts are largely fi ctional narratives in diff erent formats such as novels, magazines, television shows and fi lms, many of which appear as digital media. Some of these texts are composed by adults, often women, and are directed at girl readers and viewers in an eff ort to establish a direct or indirect pedagogical relationship with them. Th en again, depending often on how fantasy and desire is constructed in the narrative, other texts have no apparent pedagogical function, serving instead as sites (some adult-sanctioned and some not) of escape from reality. Other texts are created by the girls themselves and are directed at members of their own age group either as texts of peer education or of entertainment. We have divided this issue into two parts: the fi rst consists of articles that deal with novels of one sort or another, and in the second we have placed those that deal with media texts and, in the case of Stephanie Troutman’s article, with media literacy/ies. Here, too, appear a visual essay and two book reviews. In “Doing Her Bit: German and Anglo-American Girls’ Literature of the First World War,” Jennifer Redmann looks at diff erent works of girls’ literature published in Germany, Great Britain, the United States and Canada during or immediately after the First World War. She is interested in what these novels reveal about the gap between girls’ expectations and the opportunities available to them at this time. On the one hand, girls were being exhorted to show patriotism in serving their country but, on the other, they were constantly being reminded of the gendered limitations of such service. Redmann recognizes that when