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Scarica English summary of the book e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Letteratura solo su Docsity! CHAPTER 1 Children Reading at Home An Historical Overview The authors begin with their high adventure and close scholarly detective work in unveiling the reading lives of Jane Johnson and her family, and they end their chapter with modern day parents moving with their children into 21st century technologies. Evelyn Arizpe and Morag Styles, well known for their work together over the years, provide an historical account of parent/child reading. From a framework of connections, creativity, and critique, they demonstrate the similarities and differences in children reading at home over time—both children of privilege and those who had a hard time finding any books at all. The authors begin with their high adventure and close scholarly detective work in unveiling the reading lives of Jane Johnson and her family, and they end their chapter with modern day parents moving with their children into 21st century technologies. From “reading cards” to digital books, Arizpe and Styles offer us an insider’s view into the reading patterns in homes across the centuries. Better known for his numerous sermons and other religious works, this Puritan minister in Boston was intensely interested in the education of his children. Although he had sixteen children, only two of them survived him; one of them, Samuel, was born in 1706, the same year as Jane Johnson. Mather’s diaries, covering about 21 years of his life, provide a detailed description of both his methods for teaching reading and writing and his reflections on those methods. Highlights The authors begin with their high adventure and close scholarly detective work in unveiling the reading lives of Jane Johnson and her family, and they end their chapter with modern day parents moving with their children into 21st century technologies. William Burns took pains to educate his children by borrowing books for them “and he felt it his duty to supplement by a dialogue of his own composition, where his own private shade of orthodoxy was exactly represented.” We were guided by the fact that there are relatively few longitudinal studies of children’s development as readers, before the 20th century Despite the gaps in our knowledge before the 20th century, the accounts we have presented here allow us a glimpse into the connections, interpretations, and re- creations that were involved in children’s readerly behavior as early as the 18th century. We would venture, that despite all the future and past research—the histories, the memories, and reflections from autobiographies as well as the close, informed observation of contemporary children—there is still much about the process in which children become readers that will always remain highly personal and totally mysterious. Summary Evelyn Arizpe and Morag Styles Given the sketchy and uneven corpus of research, we have tried to provide some structure by organizing accounts in terms of particular families for whom there exists more information, usually parents teaching their own children to read or encouraging, supervising, and observing children’s early reading in the home context. What follows is typical of the history of domestic literacy in western countries elsewhere, and we hope that it will provide food for thought in considering reading in the home in other cultures as well. In their fascinating study, The Braid of Literature, Shelby Wolf and Shirley Brice Heath (1992) select three key characteristics shared by Wolf’s daughters who had been closely observed reading in the home by their mother: connections, creativity, and criticism. Even poorer families would have had the opportunity to acquire some of this printed material, increasing the opportunities for children becoming literate from an earlier age. Writers as Young Readers Detailed accounts of domestic literacy seem to be thin on the ground in the 19th century in comparison to what came before and after. “A verra takkin’ laddie, but ill to guide” (Eisler, 1999, p. 22) was the astute verdict on George Gordon Byron (1788– 1824) by his Scottish relatives. Byron spent his early years living above a shop in Aberdeen, a stubborn, fearless, “holy terror”! Charlotte Bronte (1816–1855) and her highly gifted siblings spent much of their lives isolated from wider society, partly because of the remoteness of where they lived, partly because their mother died young, and partly because their eccentric clergyman father was a loner largely leaving the children to their own devices. Another talented, highly literate family about which there is copious information are the Rossettis; the children (Maria, Gabriele, William, and Christina (1830–94) were quick to learn to read and soon became devoted to books. Three of the four children went on to become gifted writers. Reading the Word and the World Examples of writers using reading to reflect on their own lives and connect themselves sympathetically to wider humanity are legion. Mary Weller, Dickens was “a terrible child to read” (Slater, 2007, p. 4): He constantly read and reread the books in his father’s little library—the 18th C essayists, Robinson Crusoe, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, the works of Fielding and Smollett, and other novels and stories. These books became fundamental to his imaginative world, as is clearly attested by the innumerable quotations from, and allusions to, them in all his writings. (Langton, 1891, pp. 5–6). Stevenson was another autodidact whose early education was provided by his nurse, Alison Cunningham, to whom A Child’s Garden of Verses is dedicated. She looked after young Stevenson devotedly, Frank McLynn (1993) describes her as a religious maniac filling the child’s head with terrifying stories: “When he was still an impressionable infant, she read the entire Bible to him three or four times...Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and from Pilgrim’s Progress. She told stories...in which hellfire and the noonday demon seeking all whom he could devour were living realities.” Storytelling and Performance The performative and creative side of reading was highly advanced in most of our chosen authors. Clare’s mother “knew not a single letter” (Robinson, 1986, p. 2), but she encouraged him to read and learn and she spent hard earned money sending him to school whenever funds could be spared: “...every winter night our once unlettered hut was wonderfully changed in its appearance to a school room the old table...bearing at meal times the luxury of a barley loaf or dish of potatoes, was covered with the rude beginnings of scientific requisitions, pens, ink, and paper” (p. 4) Clare described his pleasure in learning favourite passages of the Bible by heart, singing ballads with his father and reading “those sixpenny chapbooks hawked by pedlars from door to door which shaped childhood imagination”. Jane Johnson used the same sort of sheets for her nursery library. Critical Readers From an early age our gifted young writers were critical readers who knew their own minds and held strong opinions of the texts they read. Marsh (1994) explains: “Almost from the cradle the young Rossettis knew a true metre from a false one, in both English and Italian, and they grew up with a knowledge of couplet, lyric and ode, to add to the rhymes of the nursery and the hymns at church” (p. 35) It was in the 19th century that at last we begin to hear the voices of the men and women whose labour produced many of the luxuries that middle- and upper-class families took for granted. Higher literacy levels among parents, wider availability of books, and new theories of development and education all influenced how children learned to read in the home. Parents have not been discouraged from doing some pre-school teaching at home. Contemporary Case Studies Our reasons for reading are as strange as our reasons for living. (Pennac, 2006, p. 174). Adults writing about their childhood memories of reading transmit strong impressions of particular books, pictures, or moments of reading, the most detailed observations of how children become readers in the home are provided by parents or carers who kept regular notes and diaries or made audio recordings of their children’s language and interaction with books. These observations allow us access to the earliest stages of reading behaviour, beyond most people’s memories. As well as books in Spanish, her daughters read many of the same English books read by the children in the case studies mentioned above and Arizpe’s observations support much of the evidence obtained from them The Reading Environment and the Books Despite different parental approaches to both child-rearing and research within their own families, and the different personalities of the children involved, it is interesting to note how similar some of their reactions are. technologies into the very heart of the home and the ways in which television and other electronic media have changed perceptions of the act of reading itself. CHAPTER 2 Questioning the Value of Literacy A Phenomenology of Speaking and reading in children As a Zuni elder focuses her eyes upon a cactus and hears the cactus begin to speak, so we focus our eyes on these printed marks and immediately hear voices. It may seem odd, in a handbook that studies and celebrates the written word for children, to include a chapter that attends to the losses involved in the child’s acquisition of traditional literacy. But as we are reminded in Betsy Hearne’s essay, our first introduction to literature is through oral stories; thus, we need to consider what it means that our young readers were first speakers and listeners, and how that transformation from orality to literature fundamentally changes perceptual frameworks. Phenomenologist Eva-Maria Simms asks readers to consider the embodied contexts of language use in children and how these contexts change with the advent of alphabetic literacy. Such understanding can help us discern what’s at stake for the “reluctant readers” we encounter in our classrooms, as well as in Campano’s and Ghiso’s discussions of immigrant children learning to read books from cultures other than their own, or in the arguments Bradford highlights surrounding the inscription of indigenous narratives. Study subjects 5 children It would go beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss the research in the field of language acquisition, but the consensus of the experts is that by the age of four preschoolers use grammar almost as well as adults (Bruner, 1993; Chomsky, 2002; Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 1996; Pinker, 1995). The complexity of young children’s speech practices is apparent in the conversation between five children, which were recorded by Vivian Paley (1981) in her kindergarten classroom. Even though Paley’s children are exposed to written language in the form of story books or reference works fetched from the library, textual material comes to them in the oral form. It is read aloud and explained by the teacher. Highlights • One of the few instances where the value of literacy is problematized occurs in the clash between indigenous cultures and the U.S education system The Native American Cochiti people have denied the transcription of their language into alphabetic notation and refused to have the written language taught to their children in schools (Martinez, 2000). • The intent of this chapter is to suspend the belief in the goodness of literacy—our chirographic bias—in order to gain a deeper understanding of how the engagement with texts structures human consciousness, and the minds of children. • Speaking and reading are both forms of language use, but with different configurations of perceptual and symbolic qualities. • It is my hope that the phenomenological analysis of the experiences of speaking and reading might help us understand more clearly how children’s literature impacts the minds of children. • One day my eight-year-old son and I wandered through the glass rooms of the botanical conservatory. Summary A Phenomenology of Speaking and Reading in Children In a handbook that studies and celebrates the written word for children, to include a chapter that attends to the losses involved in the child’s acquisition of traditional literacy. Phenomenologist Eva-Maria Simms asks readers to consider the embodied contexts of language use in children and how these contexts change with the advent of alphabetic literacy. Such understanding can help us discern what’s at stake for the “reluctant readers” we encounter in our classrooms, as well as in Campano’s and Ghiso’s discussions of immigrant children learning to read books from cultures other than their own, or in the arguments Bradford highlights surrounding the inscription of indigenous narratives. It is my hope that the phenomenological analysis of the experiences of speaking and reading might help us understand more clearly how children’s literature impacts the minds of children. Such an analysis can awaken a critical awareness of the power that letters wield as they shape the reader’s psychological reality, and it can sharpen our sense of wonder about the metamorphosis of language from speaking to writing. This echoes Ong’s (1982) statement that “writing is a pre-emptive and imperialist activity that tends to assimilate other things to itself...” (p. 12) A Visit to the Kindergarten Pre-literate children engage in language all the time, and their oral culture and the variety of the language forms they use is surprisingly sophisticated. Merleau-Ponty (1962) points out that speech is always situated in an interpersonal field and a particular location, with a speaker and a listener taking turns exchanging language: The children have their conversations in the classroom, from which the lima beans disappeared mysteriously. knowledge and traditions without texts, or with cultures that have pockets of literacy practices that are very different from our own. Paley’s (1981) children do not have to describe or define “cactus,” but have an immediate grasp of the spiny, dangerous plant and its world, and they weave it into their conversation. Speech is profoundly interpersonal and social and makes it possible “to think according to others which enriches our own thought” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 179).[2] CHAPTER 4 Reading Literature in Elementary Classrooms Kathy G. Short As a beginning classroom teacher, I struggled with the textbook programs and basal readers that were the heart of reading instruction. Literature in elementary classrooms can be viewed as no more than filler that buys some free time or as a tool that sits alongside a skills worksheet. National policy trends lean heavily toward such limited visions of reading, and yet, as Kathy Short argues, it is possible to create practices of literary reading that support children’s interest in reading processes, enjoyment in personal reading, and engagement in critical inquiry about the representations and themes literature presents. If literature opens an inquiry into life, then teaching must follow the curiosity and compassion that students are capable of bringing to reading. In this exploration of literature’s place in reading education, Short recognizes the political forces that reduce reading to test scores but provides a clear outline for framing literary reading in classrooms as vital to personal, communal, and intercultural understanding. Highlights • As a child, reading literature in the elementary classroom meant pulling a book surreptitiously from my desk when the teacher wasn’t watching. • As a beginning classroom teacher, I struggled with the textbook programs and basal readers that were the heart of reading instruction. • While my first grade students met in ability-leveled reading groups and read from inane stories in basal readers, I made time to read aloud from picture books and novels several times a day, created a classroom library, borrowed books from the school library, and set aside daily time for independent reading of self-selected books. • I immersed them in continuous experiences with literature through reading-aloud, independent reading, shared reading, book extension projects, and thematic units. • An inquiry stance encourages this engagement through focusing on children as problem-posers who seek out the questions that are significant in their lives and world, as well as problem-solvers who investigate those problems to reach new understandings, take action, and pose more complex questions and problems. • Research that investigates the complex roles literature can play within elementary classrooms and that challenges the current politicization of reading policies has tremendous potential for opening new possibilities for how literature is read within elementary contexts. Summary Reading Literature in Elementary Classrooms Literature in elementary classrooms can be viewed as no more than filler that buys some free time or as a tool that sits alongside a skills worksheet. Reading literature throughout the school day is not considered to be an “evidence-based practice for literacy instruction” with a stamp of approval from experimental research (Shanahan, 2003) and so has been relegated again to “free time” when other work is finished or assigned only to readers who have reached a level of fluent proficiency. This shift in reading literature is challenged by educators who are committed to deepening children’s reading comprehension and engagement with literary forms (Peterson & Eeds, 1990; Lehman 2007) and by those who advocate for literature study that shows children how to locate, explore, and critique their own cultural identities and views of the world as the basis for social understanding and change (Lewison, Leland, & Harste, 2008). Critical inquiry is often constrained by political agendas, teachers can and do create conditions for critical literary study through strategic reading, personal reading and transformative reading. responsibility to the group. She believes that people need to have conviction and enthusiasm about their own cultural perspectives, while remaining open to alternative views and other’s needs. Students develop faith in their own judgments while continuing to inquire and remaining open to questioning their beliefs. Literature as Inquiry into Life: When My Name Was Keoko Reading literature to experience and inquire about life is not in opposition to literature as a way to learn and inquire about particular content. In Tompkins’ classroom, issues of culture, identity, gender, war, freedom, courage, resistance, hope, and family relationships wove through students’ talk, writing, and artistic responses as they engaged in critical inquiry around Park’s novel. They identified with Sun- hee’s frustration at her lack of freedom. They connected her experiences with their own feelings of resentment toward adults who tell kids what to do and when to do it but realized that her lack of freedom was based in fear and oppression of her culture and identity that went far beyond anything they had experienced. Students returned to this book in a writing workshop study on the strategies that authors use to develop characterizations. Literature and Critical Social Inquiry Much of the research and classroom work around reading literature has focused on talk and writing as a means of responding to literature. Literature discussion provided a space for disagreement as it supported the members in developing a critical lens to examine “values, beliefs, and events in personal and collective lives, and the recognition of literacy as an empowering rather than silencing force in classrooms.” This space was influenced by the choice of literature that encouraged students to use their life experiences as linguistic and cultural tools as well as challenged them to deepen their understanding of social issues. In another example, Martínez-Roldán (2005) documents the significance of an inquiry approach to dialogue for a group of bilingual children as they read Oliver Button is a Sissy. She argues that an overemphasis on guidelines and procedures when talking about stories can instead force students to focus on product and performance. Including Everyday Texts and Oral Narratives Luke and Freebody (1997) argue that all texts represent cultural positions, ideologies and discourses and that all readers construct readings from particular epistemological stances. Luke and Freebody outline four key practices: (a) coding practices through which readers focus on developing their skills and resources as code breakers, (b) text meaning practices that focus on developing meaning and participation in text production and interpretation, (c) pragmatic practices through which readers develop knowledge of how everyday texts may work for and against their interests, and (d) critical practices that enable readers to question how a text shapes their point of view and challenges their assumptions. Their framework for reading that recognizes codes, meaning, pragmatic and critical practices is intended to initiate and guide a multi-voiced dialogue about texts in peoples’ lives. They need to develop knowledge and skills for mediating these discussions so that dominant perspectives that privilege White, middle-class interpretive resources are not assumed or taken for granted as the norm. Learning to Read Interculturally The increased availability of literature with settings in different cultures around the world has provided the opportunity for readers to immerse themselves as inquirers into story worlds that present unfamiliar ways of thinking and living. Teachers’ and students’ dialogue around these books make it possible to build intercultural understandings and global perspectives (Short, 2009a). If the book is instead read within a broader study of children’s and human rights and includes a collection of books representing Pakistan and Pakistani children’s perspectives, as well as narratives from students’ families and community members, children will have many more possible points of connection and opportunities to struggle over the voices and questions they raise through their inquiry. Children need to find their own lives in books, but if what they read only mirrors their views of the world, they cannot envision other ways of thinking and living and are not challenged to critically confront global issues. From Dialogue to the Art of Representation Research and theory related to dialogue has expanded to consider the potential of a wider range of sign systems, such as visual art and drama as tools for thinking and interpreting literature. Edmiston and Enciso (2003) believe that drama is a forum for text interpretation that can reveal and mediate children’s diverse cultural and social beliefs, through deliberate inclusion of multi-voiced, dialogic approaches that promote “an interplay of meaning among teachers and students across shifting social positions” within the drama. They argue that these drama practices dialogize the discourses of literary texts to develop children’s insights about themselves and the world. Medina used drama practices, such as tableau, acting-in-role, and hot seat, around the picture book, Friends from the Other Side (Anzaldúa, 1987), a complex story of immigration, safety, cultural identity, and community. Through her use of dramatized dialogue, Medina encouraged students to move from interpreting text as outsiders to the experience of living on the Mexican/Texas border, to developing an active dialogue as and with the characters. They talk about the ways in which he took action and their tensions about whether kids can really make a difference in a world controlled by adults. Stepping into a Primary Classroom In a classroom with younger students, Tim O’Keefe reads aloud a predictable book, Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain (Aardema, 1981), which has a cumulative rhyme about rain coming to a drought stricken area of Kenya. He first reading encourages students to enjoy the story and build a shared sense of the story’s meaning. In O’Keefe’s classroom, reading experiences move from a sense of the whole story to its specific use of language and structure and back to its whole Reading Deeply to Transform Understanding Reading literature to think about and transform understanding about oneself and the world involves reading to inquire into issues in children’s lives and in the broader society. They engage in shared thinking about ideas based on critical inquiries that matter in their lives and world. These critical inquiries involve the types of discussion described earlier in children’s dialogue and responses to Oliver Button is a Sissy, Iqbal (D’Adamo, 2001), Friends from the Other Side (Anzaldúa, 1987), and Felita (Mohr, 1979). This focus on the intensive reading of a few books to think deeply and critically, balances the extensive reading of many books. These engagements and purposes for reading are connected by the belief that the reading curriculum should not be delivered to students but constructed with students as they engage in wondering and seeking insights into their own literacy processes and literary experience. Reading Education as a Political Act Reading education has been one of the most controversial and contested areas of international debate among both educators and politicians. The intense debate over literacy has led to the imposition of one-size-fits-all models of national literacy standards and high stakes testing through legislation and policy initiatives such as the National Literacy Strategy in England, No Child Left Behind and Reading First in the United States, and the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy in Australia These initiatives and public debates over reading standards have shaped the political environments that are highly receptive to centralized and prescriptive approaches to reading education— especially in elementary and primary schools. These public debates and government initiatives have positioned teachers as objects of policy directives, rather than as active co-constructors of curriculum for their students. The belief that children learn best in holistic contexts that strive to preserve the authenticity of materials and encourage inquiry is under attack or has been dismissed in many parts of the world, and many policy makers view reading literature as a supplementary activity in elementary schools. Conclusion An inquiry stance to literature and curriculum invites children to make meaning of texts in personally and culturally significant ways to facilitate learning and to develop lifelong reading attitudes and habits. An inquiry stance encourages this engagement through focusing on children as problem-posers who seek out the questions that are significant in their lives and world, as well as problem-solvers who investigate those problems to reach new understandings, take action, and pose more complex questions and problems.Elementary educators value the role of story in children’s lives and the ways in which children use story to construct their understandings of themselves and their world. This belief in the power of story as inquiry, has often focused on how to use literature to support the teaching of literacy and content, rather than on valuing literature as a way of thinking and re-visioning life. Research that investigates the complex roles literature can play within elementary classrooms and that challenges the current politicization of reading policies has tremendous potential for opening new possibilities for how literature is read within elementary contexts. Contributions An inquiry stance to literature and curriculum invites children to make meaning of texts in personally and culturally significant ways to facilitate learning and to develop lifelong reading attitudes and habits. Children gain a sense of possibility for their lives and that of the society in which they live along with the ability to consider others’ perspectives and needs. Engagement with literature thus allows them to develop their own voices and, at the same time, go beyond self interest to an awareness of broader human consequences. An inquiry stance encourages this engagement through focusing on children as problem-posers who seek out the questions that are significant in their lives and world, as well as problem-solvers who investigate those problems to reach new understandings, take action, and pose more complex questions and problems. Elementary educators value the role of story in children’s lives and the ways in which children use story to construct their understandings of themselves and their world. This belief in the power of story as inquiry, however, has often focused on how to use literature to support the teaching of literacy and content, rather than on also valuing literature as a way of thinking and re- visioning life. In addition, many elementary educators are struggling with the politicization of reading instruction to the point that children are no longer able to meaningfully engage with literature. Research that investigates the complex roles literature can play within elementary classrooms and that challenges the current politicization of reading policies has tremendous potential for opening new possibilities for how literature is read within elementary contexts. The second section focuses on the characteristics of texts that have been viewed by critics, scholars, and educators as well-suited to middle grade readers. We examine these characteristics to establish a sense of distinction for readers as they move into the transformative period of young adolescence. We describe active, inquiry based, social approaches to literary reading that enable young people to live inside worlds, rather than looking in from the outside. Readers and Reading Inside Social Worlds Some studies of adolescent readers have claimed that students’ interest in reading declines in middle school. A multi-case study of sixth-grade students found that “individual middle level readers were multidimensional as readers, and their abilities and dispositions toward reading varied with different contexts”. Along with their perceptions of classroom-based reading, it is important to understand how adolescents interpret reading in other parts of their lives. Moje et al (2008) contend that we need to know more about relationships between literacy practices outside of classrooms and school-based literacy, as well as how they are mutually constitutive. We believe this is important for middle-level readers because they are involved in constructing and performing identities that are linked with, yet, challenge and transform traditional cultural understandings of literacy. Young adolescent readers will need instruction on how to read a novel and how to critically analyze ideology. Shifting Practices How middle-level readers respond to and engage with literature has been a trend in recent research (Almasi, 1995; Alverman et al, 1996; Lewis, 1997; Evans, 2002). Wolf (2004) delineates between “text centered” and “text edged” drama as interpretive work in which an author’s words are either central to creating a performative event such as reader’s theater and classroom theater or, on the other hand, tableaux, and unwritten conversations, which stray further from the text. Key to both approaches is the concept of “critical space” in which teachers and students step out of a dramatic sequence of instruction with literature to examine how roles were taken up and critique the creation of the fictional experience. Using such a framework, a teacher could use text edged drama to explore issues of family or perspectives suggested in the middle-level novel, No More Dead Dogs (Korman, 2000). This allows possibilities for co-learning, and modeling, and it can involve students in reading, speaking, listening, and writing in response to middle-level novels. Findings The results suggest a mismatch between school structures, such as mandated curriculum and instructional approach. The results showed significant differences in students. The results indicated that students’ responses changed from primarily categorical to more analytic, and “their preferences and understandings about reading literature became increasingly complex across the four years of the study” New Directions for Research We consider new directions for research that will help detail and define instructional practices for teachers working with middle-level readers. We have theorized that process drama as a tool of literature instruction with young adolescents could help them discover intersections of reader interest and social positioning, and we believe such a line of research could provide evidence that would enrich learning in literature classrooms. We made claims for identifying literature that is interesting and imaginatively evocative for middle level-readers, and we theorized characteristics of this new category of literature based on research with this age reader. These categories are dynamic, and we believe may help young readers choose literature that interests them and provides a catalyst for imaginative thinking. We see process drama as a mode of response that can help teachers of these young readers step into fictional worlds that they have created with students, and engage in interpretations of literature that are social, innovative, critical, and could transform classrooms into spaces where imagination fuels learning. CHAPTER 6 Children Reading at Home: An Historical Overview Evelyn Arizpe; Morag Styles 2011 We argue that the social, economic, and technological conditions that shape the teaching and learning of literature in secondary school today have led to value being placed on the production of the global citizen and, by consequence, a state of flux in English classrooms. While the preceding chapters on elementary and middle school literature demonstrate the dynamic change in classroom environments focused primarily on inquiry and response-based curriculum, Cynthia Lewis and Jessica Dockter redefine what literature and reading are becoming in secondary settings. Caught between the rock of unchanging text selection and the hard place of rigid curriculum based on testing expectations, secondary English teachers struggle to find room for movement in the face of cultural change. Yet, the authors lay out a vision for loosening the grip of disciplines that are consistently and ironically disciplined by tradition, and they argue for a more dynamic pedagogy that would highlight the potential of identity formation and transformation for youth within hybrid and multimodal “redefinitions of text, language, and global citizenship.” Study subjects 8 educators transformations and fundamentalisms associated with secondary school literature studies. Disciplinary Discourse Secondary school is commonly perceived as a space/time for learning disciplinary knowledge, with achievement in secondary school often measured by students’ knowledge of disciplinary epistemologies and their attendant terminologies. The role of the teacher is central to the process of marrying culturally responsive teaching with domain-specific instruction in literary analysis in that the teacher must recognize students’ developing interpretive strategies in order to make them explicit and to reinforce them as conventions that can be applied to other texts. This pedagogical skill is essential if the goal is for students to learn how to analyze literature in ways that are expected in school and on achievement tests that include literary reading. We take up a significant aspect of the redefinition of text. Multimodality and Literature Perhaps the most obvious effect of globalization on literature study in secondary school is the inclusion of multi-modal texts, which often are shaped by global economic and cultural flows produced through digital media. Not all multimodal texts require digital technology, as can be seen in the increasing popularity of the often community and performance-based texts of spoken word (Fisher, 2005; Jocson, 2006), and peer-culture texts such as graphic novels (Schwarz, 2006) and manga (Schwartz & Rubinstein-Ávila, 2006). Daunting as this textual landscape may be, school-based and university-based educators, especially in England, where media education is part of the national curriculum, have been making multimodal texts and text production the center of their curricula for over a decade. In an article on working with preservice English educators in ways that encourage them to support their students’ multimodal expression and representation, Albers (2006) suggested starting with a focus novel and inviting students to seek connections to other art or media in order to better understand the effects of trans mediation across sign systems. This activity aligns with what Jenkins (2006b) called “convergence culture,” which underscores intertextual connections that emerge from global flows and active participation across media formats on the part of audiences/consumers. Students in this Advanced Placement class managed to retain their positions as serious students, appealing to both their teachers’ and their peers’ sensibilities as well as taking up “hybrid social languages” (West, 2008, p. 588). Transforming Literature Study in Secondary School Hayles (2007) argued “the practices, texts, procedures, and processual nature of electronic literature require new critical models and new ways of playing and interpreting the works.” In the examples of research included in this chapter, there are new practices worth underscoring. Sha Cage, a spoken word artist and activist in the area where the authors of this chapter live, incorporates local issues such as homelessness and poverty into her poetry while accessing connections to hip-hop, blues, and jazz and national figures such as June Jordan and Martin Luther King, Jr., who she refers to as “June and Martin.”. Her poetry draws on the local understandings of the live audience while connecting them to larger issues of social justice through globally known individuals and movements. Future work Their results carried implications for practice, policy, and future research, and in this way, students developed critical literacies with a goal of social transformation. CHAPTER 13 School Libraries and the Transformation of Readers and Reading Eliza T. Dresang; Marina Kotrla 2011 The literature isn’t a single, fixed organism but a large number of texts grouped together under a rubric, and that categorization is always dependent on the eye of the beholder. Literary histories, like literary theories, begin with a particular perspective. Ideological conceptions of what constitutes literature, material conditions, and prior histories are among the forces that shape how one writes the history of a particular genre. Deborah Stevenson walks readers through the considerations necessary for forming and critiquing a history of children’s and young adult literature before embarking on her own meta-reflective rendering of how literature for youth evolved from classical times to the advent of modern children’s literature. Personal perspective returns as Lois Lowry reminds us that we each have our own history of the literature that drew us in as readers, regardless of what the literary historians say we should have paid attention to. Study subjects 11 books for young people The strongest candidate for a near-miss at being the father of children’s literature, who would probably have snagged Newbery’s “first” title had there been no Newbery, is Thomas Boreman, who began publishing material for young readers in the 1730s, and who is considered by scholar Mary Jackson (1989) to be a genre founder alongside Newbery and Mary Cooper. Boreman was the publisher and presumed author of 10 or 11 books for young people. Most notable are his “Gigantick Histories” titles, beginning in 1740, which described historic landmarks Harvey Darton (1932/1982) opens his masterwork Children’s Books in England with this definition of children’s books: “printed works produced ostensibly to give children spontaneous pleasure, and not primarily to teach them, nor solely to make them good, nor to keep them profitably quiet” (p. 1, italics Darton). One of his successors, Percy Muir (1954), states that his history is “mainly concerned with books produced for children’s entertainment” (p. 217), while E. Darton (1932/1982) in his preface describes children’s literature as “the scene of a battle between instruction and amusement, between restraint and freedom, between hesitant morality and spontaneous happiness” (p. vii), and that polarization becomes a largely unchallenged tenet of the literature, providing the spectrum that underpins nearly every genre history prior to the 21st century. The Issue of Didacticism The result is that many things children have read don’t meet all historians’ standards for children’s literature. Historic books designed for use in schooling or lessons, to teach children writing or philosophy or comportment, have clear descendants in contemporary textbooks rather than the trade books one finds in bookstores or libraries, and they are omitted from histories with enjoyment-based definitions of children’s literature. Didacticism remains a strong element of contemporary children’s books ostensibly designed for pleasure (Dr Seuss, for instance, is one of the most unflaggingly moralistic authors in children’s literature history), and children’s literature remains an important instrument of education; even the library science advocacy for reading often boils down to encouraging children to find pleasure in books so that they may progress better in their education. We’ve never been in it just for the fun. The Issue of Audience Children have never been as concerned as scholars with definitions, and they’ve always complicated the categorization of children’s literature by happily reading books written for adult audiences. Historians don’t generally consider a title to be children’s literature merely because a child has read it, but they must decide how to approach “crossover books,” those works that begin as titles for adults and become the reading matter of children. Classics such as Swift’s (1726) Gulliver’s Travels and Defoe’s (1719) Robinson Crusoe figure prominently in the history of children’s reading, but do they count as children’s literature if their intended audience wasn’t children? Most historians feel obliged to include them_ Darton (1932/1982), for example, argues that any picture of children’s literature would be incomplete if it omitted such works on a technicality; he notes, in case justification is required, that these works spawned editions clearly intended for a child audience soon after they were published, which indicates a publisher awareness of the child audience for the original title. Such a crossover can even happen to an entire kind of narrative, as it has with folklore, once the domain of adults, more commonly associated with children. The result is an implication that the for-children-and-for-pleasure condition is the genre’s goal and pinnacle of achievement rather than its actual membership requirement, despite initial claims to the contrary. The Issue of Practicality It’s fascinating to consider how much simple practical issues, not just literary ones, can affect literary history. While oral materials could be transmitted during work activities, pleasure readers need to have the leisure in which to read, not a situation all groups or ages of people could historically count on as we witnessed in Arizpe and Styles’s opening Handbook chapter on reading in the home. Since such leisure time often occurs after dark, readers need light sources, not always easy to obtain in households with no electricity and little budget for candles. Historians may be missing considerable amounts of literary history; Darton (1932/1982) even posits the existence of nearly a whole genre of early children’s books that have since been lost to scholars save in its undetected influence on orally transmitted narrative or on later works. The Issue of Human Nature It’s important to remember that literary historians are only human, and they bring their own subjectivity and biases, so that their judgments of historical significance are never objectively factual. The result are histories that imply that children frustratedly gnawed at hand-me down adult books and religious texts, sulking at the injustice of living before Captain Underpants and paging through Puritan tales of martyrdom in the disappointed hope that they would be as good as Gossip Girls. Whether we like these children’s books or not, many of their young readers clearly did, and they and the literature deserve to have such tastes honestly recorded. Literary histories tend to focus on identifiable and individual texts, and materials such as chapbooks make their effect in mass, like books of Garfield cartoons (e.g., Davis, 1980) or trivia compilations such as Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader (e.g., Bathroom Readers’ Institute, 1988) They may not have been improving works or literature written with great care for style or eloquence—they were made to sell, and sell they did. Teaching anthologies, which are hotly contested markers of canonical significance in other genres, have in the last few years become available for children’s literature, so the Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (Zipes, 2005) may come to affect the picture of children’s literature much as other Norton anthologies have done for their genres. Literature from the Classical Era to Gutenberg Our earliest indications of children’s reading date to the classical era, wherein records suggest that young people were largely reading adult texts or adaptations thereof, and this is the era least explored by historians of children’s literature. was by no means the first example of domestic realism, but it has become the best known; much as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll, 1865) operates as the first standard-bearer for the fantastical thread in children’s literature, Little Women represents the domestic thread. Johanna Spyri’s (1880, English edition 1884) Heidi became the face of Switzerland to readers of children’s literature worldwide; Spyri took the traditional Swiss story of village life and individualized it into a compelling story of a young girl’s contrasting experiences in town and in country, with the peaceful rural existence celebrated for its beauty. It was England, that propelled the picture book into new and exciting form in the 19th century. Its founding marks the beginning of the modern age of children’s literature, with its thousands of books per year, its awards, and its bestseller lists. Conclusion It’s a strange and complicated journey from Latin readers to new millennium medal winners, and it’s far from complete, since our contemporary version of the genre is just a stop along the way. The literature isn’t a single, fixed organism but a large number of texts grouped together under a rubric, and that categorization is always dependent on the eye of the beholder. This overview too is a product of bias, culture, time, and practical exigencies— stuffing the entire history of children’s literature into a chapter requires the merciless excision of most of it, after all. There’s still great meaning in the collection of texts and discernible connections between its elements, changeable though their interpretation may be. These nearly two millennia of history, of adult hopes and intentions and children’s duties and pleasures, allows us to better understand the texts, conventions, and assumptions in our current world of children’s literature, even as it itself becomes history. Lois Lowry There are still talking animals, like the ones in the Aesop fables of our childhood; but they no longer advise us on how to become worthy children. They say very funny stuff, often, and they do some pretty sophisticated things. I read to my own grandchildren a story in which there was a fox He had a toothache and went to the dentist, who was named Doctor De Soto. I think, when I was eight or nine and lasted until I was eleven, ending only because we left the United States and I no longer had access to my hidden vice. Little Lulu is showing up again in other guises with new identities, and oh, I am glad to see her counterparts in the books I give to my grandchildren these days! Builds on previous work. Some writers aren’t prepared to consider popular materials literature at all: Thwaite (1972), for instance, refers to broadsheets, inexpensively printed and widely available, as “trash” (p. 16) and considers publishers of inexpensive marvels and gossip “less reputable” (p. 39). Our histories of the genre have displayed a similar bias. Additionally, teaching anthologies, which are hotly contested markers of canonical significance in other genres, have in the last few years become available for children’s literature, so the Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (Zipes, 2005) may come to affect the picture of children’s literature much as other Norton anthologies have done for their genres. It’s also worth admitting that taste plays a role here, and that the affections of scholars are as variable as anybody else’s; forced to choose between two books that offer similar opportunities of discussion and elaboration, we’ll often choose the one we simply prefer, leaving generations of students and their following students believing that our selected book is more significant than the omitted text. Contributions It’s a strange and complicated journey from Latin readers to new millennium medal winners, and it’s far from complete, since our contemporary version of the genre is just a stop along the way. Ultimately, the literature isn’t a single, fixed organism but many texts grouped together under a rubric, and that categorization is always dependent on the eye of the beholder. This overview too is a product of bias, culture, time, and practical exigencies—stuffing the entire history of children’s literature into a chapter requires the merciless excision of most of it, after all. Nonetheless, there’s still great meaning in the collection of texts and discernible connections between its elements, changeable though their interpretation may be. Examining the past, these nearly two millennia of history, of adult hopes and intentions and children’s duties and pleasures, allows us to better understand the texts, conventions, and assumptions in our current world of children’s literature, even as it itself becomes history. as the relationship between series books and children’s literature is symbiotic. Point of Departure author Candice Ransom was inspired by Trixie Belden mysteries to write the adventure stories she loved to read. She is still writing them; her 100+ titles include more than a dozen in the perennially popular Boxcar Children series. Written initially for a working class adult readership but enjoyed by children, dime novels told stories about the frontier, Indian captivity, pirates on the high seas, detectives in disguise, telephone boys who succeed in business, orphaned sewing girls who find love, millionaires disguised as millhands, and so on. These 10 cents and 5 cent formats were the 19th-century forerunners of the 20th- century series books for children and were produced by the same “fiction factory” methods (Cook, 1912) in which the writer was just one node in an industrial production line that depended upon Fordist principles of quantity, uniformity, and speed. Speed was often what stories were about, as characters with names like the Speedwell Boys, the Motor Girls, or Dave Dashaway were propelled through space on galloping horses, trains, ice-boats, cars or, in the case of Tom Swift, futuristic vehicles such as an electric runabout, sky racer, or sky train. Popular Fiction and the Expansion of Reading Dime books, penny dreadfuls, and series books were compelling stories that keep their readers reading by tricks and formulas developed over centuries by writers of popular stories. Much of the criticism of dime novels and series books, as we shall see, involves the application of standards for realism—i.e., plausibility and probability— to stories that are nearer to the pole of romance than to the pole of realism. The closeness of these popular fictions to displace fairy tales accounts is reason for their popularity with children and with beginning readers. Series books become the reader’s first introduction to powerful literary forms. Scorned Literature and Pernicious Reading Tom Sawyer imagined running away to sea and returning triumphant as “Tom Sawyer the Pirate—the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main.” “False views of life,” sniffed all those cultural authorities who worried about the effects of popular fiction on impressionable minds. The dime book and later the series book became a lightning rod for anxieties about uncultivated readers with low tastes reading too many books, enjoying it too much, and acquiring false views of life. To some extent this uneasiness can be explained as the worry by a cultural elite that things were getting out of hand. Popular fiction, including dime books, penny dreadfuls, and series books, provides pure entertainment, is not intended to instruct, and is considered a waste of time. The campaign to promote “the best” did not need to attack dime novels and series books. It is not either/or but both/and when it comes to readers reading popular fiction and literary fiction. Both past and present, of cheap construction, worthless literary quality, and pernicious perils in terms of children’s development, it appears that series books are here to stay. Academic References Annotations of teen fiction in paperback series. Jones: A struggling reader makes a connection to literacy. Candice Ransom Wedged behind was a book called Trixie Belden and the Mysterious Visitor. Whenever I picked up Trixie Belden and the Secret of the Mansion, I was immediately welcomed into a community where I could stay for the duration of that book and others in the series. The Trixie Belden series was created by Julie Campbell Tatham, a literary agent who answered Western Publishing’s call for writers to produce fast-paced, well-written mysteries. She set the series in her beloved Hudson River Valley. Slip into a card table reading tent filled with pillows and snacks and head for Sleepyside, where there are gardens to weed, codes to crack, and a red B.W.G. jacket just their size, hanging on a nail inside the gatehouse. CHAPTER 17 African American Children’s Literature: Researching Its Development, Exploring Its Voices Rudine Sims Bishop 2011 That freedom can be used to imagine new possibilities for human life, especially in this age of post-structuralism, where we find ourselves fragmented both socio-culturally and individually. The history of American children’s literature attests to the legitimacy of Toni Morrison’s claim that an African American literature-literary art by African Americans in their own words-is a necessity, no less for children’s literature than for literature addressed to an adult readership. Up until the mid-1960s, the world of American children’s books could be characterized as largely homogeneous and fundamentally mono-cultural. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, when people of color did appear in children’s books, they were, with a few notable exceptions, most often presented from a cultural perspective that viewed them as inferior in some way-comical, primitive, pitiable, or in need of paternalistic care. So common were these representations early in the 20th century that even kindergarten age Black children understood that the popular and dominant images of Black children in books had little to do with their own reality. In the early 1930s, teacher/author Eva Knox Evans reported that when she read to her Black kindergarten children the draft of a book she was writing about a young Black girl much like themselves, her pupils did not realize, in the absence of the illustrations, Unlike the objects produced by individual artists, picture books are the result of a process involving several people: authors, illustrators, editors, designers, and all the technically savvy people who know how to produce excellent reproductions of the original art and bind the resulting pages into a book. The book is ready to go into production. This involves reproducing the illustrations by a number of different means, usually photo-offset, which involves photographing the illustration through a successive series of fine screens or filters that separate the illustration into four parts, which will be printed on top of each other so that the finished reproduction will be as close to the original colors as possible. The advances in reproduction give artists a virtually unlimited choice of what media and techniques they can employ to illustrate picture books. Qualities of Picture books: The Picture book as an Aesthetic Object The illustrations in a picture book are meant to be seen in sequence; we can only look at one opening at a time, so some mention must be made of the traditional elements of visual design—color, line, shape, and texture—common to all visual art rendered in two dimensions. Even young children can grasp the concept of style if practitioners begin by contrasting two very different styles, such as the fluid, loose watercolor style of Jerry Pinkney, with its pencil under drawing, and the outline style of DePaola, with its rounded shapes, minimalist depictions of characters’ facial expressions, and extensive use of acrylic or watercolor tints rather than fully saturated colors. After discussing these differences, we can distinguish more subtle differences in style, and help children to perceive these differences. Taking a Tour of a Picture book I want to give a sense of the various parts of picturebooks by giving directions for examining these elements closely. I’ll share some insights about the design elements of Los Gatos Black on Halloween by Marisa Montes (2007). It would be most useful if you had these books in front of you as you toured the books with me. The endpapers of Let it Shine are as colorful and exuberant as the front cover, with wavy stripes of various colors, suggesting the lines of a staff of music as well as a horizon line; two large hands; and what appear to be photographs of two pairs of scissors on top of the hands. The hands suggest both the spiritual “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” and the illustrator’s own hands. How is the font chosen for the words appropriate to the tone and setting of the story? In general, how do all these elements work together to produce a satisfying and harmonious aesthetic whole? The Relationship of Words and Pictures As I mentioned in the introduction, the intricate dance between text and pictures is the sine qua non of the picture-book. Nikolajeva and Scott’s (2001) typology is perhaps the most complex. They suggest that there are five distinct word-picture relationships: (a) symmetry; (b) complementarity; (c) enhancement; (d) counterpoint; and (e) contradiction. All of these typologies make the point that, in the same picture book, the words and visual images may interact in one way on one opening, and in entirely different ways in other openings. The typologies suggest that if the relationships between words and pictures are so complex, the relationships added by other modalities must be even more interconnected and complicated. This is another argument for revisiting, re-reading, and re-viewing picturebooks. Word-picture relationships integrate sign systems: Steiner (1982), writing about illustrated books, observes that they are “a gesture toward semiotic repleteness” (p. 144) much in the way that an opera combines music, visual interest, drama, and narrative in a multi-sensual way. Other Important Elements of the Picture book Format When we turn to the fifth opening, the illustration depicts Aneesa sitting in the mosque with her grandmother, trying to pay attention, but thinking about her parents, who have gone to Saudi Arabia for the Hajj pilgrimage. The mood changes from one of delight in tasting the delicious lamb korma to the reflective mood in the mosque, where Aneesa misses her parents. Speculating about these things allows reader/viewers to piece together each successive double page spread into a seamless narrative. That freedom can be used to imagine new possibilities for human life, especially in this age of post-structuralism, where we find ourselves fragmented both socio-culturally and individually. A Growing Recognition of the Aesthetic Importance of Picturebooks Salisbury (2007) states that “In recent years the field of children’s book illustration has attracted an expanding range of artists, drawn to the area by the potential for authorial creative design and by the elevated status of artists working in picturebooks”. One sign of the burgeoning interest in picturebooks is the museums and collections devoted to them, for example the Oshima Museum in Japan; the Eric Carle Museum in Massachusetts; and the Marantz Collection of picturebooks at Kent State University in Ohio, as well as the Seven Stories Collection in the United Kingdom, all of which Elizabeth Hammill well describes in her chapter in this volume. Another indication of the “pictorial turn” is the increasing sophistication of wordless picturebooks and the prizes that they have been awarded. Older readers can evaluate and critique any picture book’s integration of text and pictures and the ways in which all its constituent elements complement and inform each other in order to achieve artistic wholeness. The Postmodern Picturebook Meta fictive or postmodern picturebooks, though continuing to be a very small fraction of the total number of picturebooks published, have increased in importance announced the 2008 book award winners. Picture books stand both in the traditional historical evolution of children’s literature, and are poised to be on the cutting edge, promoting all types of new literacies. Chris Raschka He presents forthrightly the idea that I have always held dear, that is, that it is the book itself, which is the work of art, not the illustrations, not the text, and not anything else, but the book as an object, in all of its materialness. The manner is the picture book, and it is this manner that Professor Sipe has so well detailed. The first involves the basic idea of the gutter, that spot in the middle of a two-page spread where the pages come together at the spine. The result in the published book was to create the impression that when laid open, the bend of the paper and the plunging of the gutter produced a visually even beat of the eighth-note colour-squares across the one bar, two-page spread. Larry, for your work, which makes my own seem a little less silly. David Wiesner When the story moves into the sky, the format changes to full-bleed double page spreads, i.e., the pictures extend all the way to the edge of the paper. Some of these spreads have an inset rectangle that is a single image or divided into smaller panels. As the pictures expand to the edge of the page and beyond, the reader is drawn into that world and made a part of it. It is a simple but effective way to visually separate the two realities of the story. The design of a picture book can encompass the pages where the story takes place, and the cover, the title page, the endpapers, and even the binding. When I am working, I strive to reach the point where there is nothing I could take away from the story and there is nothing I need to add. Confirmation of earlier findings Kress and Van Leeuven (1996) suggest that shapes on the left (verso) side of the double page spread indicate the status quo and stability, whereas those on the right (recto) side suggest the possibility of change or motion, since they are near the place where we will turn the page. Shapes near the center get our attention first, and often signal importance or domination (Moebius, 1986) The issues surrounding the representation of gender in picture books are complex and varied (Lehr, 2001) as well. We know that the socialization of gender occurs very early in children’s lives (Davies, 1990), and that picture books generally continue this socialization, so that it is clear to even very young children that boys learn how to act (and do not act) in certain ways, and that the same is true for girls Counterpoint to earlier claims Texture is difficult to represent on the smooth paper in picture books, but the illusion of texture—in three dimensions—as rough or smooth, hard or soft, is made possible by the exacting reproduction techniques discussed above. The variety of highly textured hand-made papers of Bulgarian illustrator Sibylla Benatova’s backgrounds for the illustrations in The Magic Raincoat (David, 2007) contrast nicely with the slick, shiny smooth renditions of a little girl in her raincoat, rendered on mylar. CHAPTER 18 Comics and Graphic Novels Robin Brenner 2023 Sceptics voice many concerns over comics and graphic novels, wondering why anyone would read them in the first place, and why they should be considered “real” reading. As the story of comics has shifted across time, continents, and formats, so too have readers’ interests and tastes. Robin Brenner details the history of creating and marketing comic books, in all its forms, from the mid-1800s to the present, while never taking her eye off the readers who, today, keep the books circulating at breakneck pace through libraries, bookstores, and online sources. The rise and popularity of this multi-faceted form— among adults and children, critics, and consumers—suggests that its literary and artistic qualities hold endless potential for reshaping what and how we read stories. Following Brenner’s descriptive history and analysis, Gareth Hinds’ illustrated essay takes readers through the creative process of transforming well-known stories into a visual, graphic novel format. The chapter concludes with a comic essay, “The Beginning,” by Raina Telgemeier, that brings into focus a young reader’s first, deeply felt, encounter with a book-length comic. Findings The Diary of a Wimpy Kid is a true hybrid in that portions of the story are told as comics and portions are told in prose. Is it simply a question of how much comics content there is? If it is more than 50%, does that make a text a graphic novel? Many of these questions are still being debated, as they should be, and we may never see a resolution that satisfies all interested parties. Comics Literacy Graphic novels have elements that are like everything from picture books to video games to traditional prose, but they function differently in what they demand from the reader. Kids and teens learn from an early age to parse combinations of images and text in a variety of ways, and so reading a graphic novel feels new but within their scope of understanding. Aspect to aspect uses the view of each panel to highlight a different element of a scene: a character’s angry expression, a slammed down coffee cup, a jostled flower in a vase, and retreating feet might all come together to indicate a character’s abrupt departure from dinner. This kind of transition requires connections be made by the reader in a more active process than more instinctive transitions and is partly the reason Japanese manga can seem more incomprehensible to new readers (McCloud, 2006). Aside from the most noticeable aspects of comics including text, images, and panels, a myriad of smaller elements further distinguishes the format and become a code new readers must break to get the most out of their reading. Sound is integrated to an even greater degree in Japanese manga where thousands more words are used for sound effects that English cannot approximate, including making a dramatic entrance, a heartbeat, and blushing. A Brief History of Comics Cartoons and comics have a long artistic legacy, arguably reaching back to Egyptian hieroglyphs and ancient Greek pottery, but the first landmark cartoons in the modern European tradition appeared in the 1730s with the publication of A Rake’s Progress by noted satirist, painter and engraver William Hogarth. A Rake’s Progress includes illustrations and captions presented in sequence and is a prime example of the kind of cartooning accepted as satire and criticism in the newspapers and magazines of the day (Sabin, 1996). In the 1880s and 1890s, a number of comic strips and stories appeared in Europe led by the 1860s German comic strip Max und Moritz by Wilhelm Busch. These strips in turn inspired The Katzenjammer Kids by Rudolph Dirks in the United States and during the same period the Ally Sloper comics magazine series in England (Becker, 1959; Sabin, 1996). Outcault can claim popularizing the first major comic strip character in the United States with his creation of the Yellow Kid in the strip Hogan’s Alley, and his work is notable for the first use of color as well as his famous struggle for rights to the character between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer (Silverman, 1994). From Comic Strips to Comic Books Out of comic strips were born comic books, and once again Europe lays claim to initial innovations in expanding the form. In the 1920s, the Belgian comic Tintin by Hergé (e.g., 1994) was published in a special supplement to the newspaper, Le Petit Vingtième, and was soon collected and on sale bound in book form. Francophone comics published mainly in Belgium and France, are to this day most commonly sold as bound volumes rather than anything approximating the more ephemeral comic book. Their immediate shift into bound volumes demonstrates the longstanding respect for the medium that has led France to count comics as fine art rather than low culture (Sabin, 1996). Masked vigilantes began to crop up from a variety of publishers, including the still dominant DC Comics and Marvel Comics, keen to cash in on the immediate demand for more. Introducing the Comics Code Comics flourished in the 1940s, and while superheroes intended for kids and teens initially dominated the market, adult science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and crime comics skyrocketed in popularity once they were introduced. Action-packed, lurid series published by EC Comics including Weird Science, Crime Does Not Pay, and The Vault of Horror exemplified this trend. This broadening of the market was short-lived. The Comics Code was similar to the Hayes Code in the film industry, intended to ensure appropriate content for young readers. Its creation, paired with comics publishers’ simultaneous loss of a major distributor, effectively squashed adult-oriented comics. As comics continued into the 1950s, they narrowed their aim exclusively to children and teens. The lingering conviction that these are the only appropriate audience for comics is still powerful in American culture today. Superheroes: Gods and Geeks The waning popularity of comics in post-War culture in the United States led to a boom in the one genre still considered acceptable: superhero comics. Marvel Comics responded by launching in quick succession some of their most popular characters, many created by Stan Lee: The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the X-Men, and assembling their own superpowered team in The Avengers, led by a revived Captain America. The defining element of these comics is a shift toward character driven stories and Marvel’s decision to make their heroes more human and fallible (Weiner, 2003). Marvel’s intent was to explore heroics that came from ordinary men and women, not the unreachable ideal of gods, and Spider-Man remains one of the most iconic superheroes of our time. Finding Comics: Underground and Direct Markets Underground comics, known as comix, arose from a reaction against both mainstream superhero comics and the Comics Code Authority and are represented by the imaginations of R. Japanese manga publishers made two major decisions that led their titles, and businesses, to tremendous success: they decided to publish mainly paperbacks, rather than continuing to attempt enticing traditional comic book readers with comic book versions; and they decided to leave titles “unflipped,” in the traditional, right to left In Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in October 2009 the comic anthology Stuck in the Middle: Seventeen Comics from an Unpleasant Age, edited by Ariel Schrag (2007) was removed after a challenge from the circulating collection of two middle schools. There is no standard ratings system for comics, though individual publishers have created their own systems for indicating content and suggesting intended audiences. The sting of the memory of the Comics Code Authority crackdown has made many comics publishers resistant to stricter or overarching attempts to rate their products. Publishing Comics: Collectors Versus Readers Libraries have been a part of what is a distinct shift in the recognized market for graphic novels. As more trailblazing graphic novels like Craig Thompson’s (2003) Blankets and Marjane Satrapi’s (2003) Persepolis arrived and were discovered by book clubs and adults who had either never read or forgotten why they read comics, readers became a vital audience for graphic novels. Readers in this case, as opposed to collectors, are consumers interested not in the physical object of the book or comic issue but in the content. Demands and encourage an awareness of the range and depth of what the format offers readers. A Graphic Novel for Every Reader Certain audiences have been recognized as notable consumers of comics and graphic novels: initially, teenage boys and adult men, and more recently teenage girls, as the manga boom dominated the market. Within my own library’s teen collection, graphic novels in 2008 made up for 35% of the collection’s total circulation, beating out even the DVDs and paperbacks as the most popular format in the collection. In 2008, legendary wife and husband team Francoise Mouly and Art Speigelman launched TOON books, a publishing venture devoted entirely to titles for the youngest audiences, children ages four and up. Demand for kids’ comics is outpacing production, but publishers and creators are poised to release more quality titles into the market. Current Trends Today’s comics readers are an eclectic group. Many of the expected divisions remain superhero fans still seek out their favorite spandex clad crime fighters, and manga devotees leave with stacks of volumes of their favorite series. One of the major problems facing publishers arises directly out of participatory online fan culture: the distribution of comics, especially Japanese manga, via various channels on the Internet. Works still only available in Japanese, are “scanlated”: fans scan in the pages, translate the text, and publish the results online for reading or download. These practices do have a positive side for publishers, raising an awareness of a property before it officially arrives and even allowing manga publishers to gain a strong sense of how popular a series would be where it licensed and published in the United States. As publishing online continues to gain ground, the future of comics and graphic novels is likely to spread across platforms including PDAs, cell phones, and digital book readers. The format, will remain the same, and while the delivery device may shift from paper to screen, there is no sign of readers’ fondness for the format slowing down. Academic and Media References Batman comic bought at the local library. Findings The Diary of a Wimpy Kid is a true hybrid in that portions of the story are told as comics and portions are told in prose. Is it a question of how much comics content there is? If it is more than 50%, does that make a text a graphic novel? Many of these questions are still being debated, as they should be, and we may never see a resolution that satisfies all interested parties. Adult graphic novel collections are just starting to be separated out in terms of placement and statistics, but even in our library’s smaller collection, circulation has gone up over 50% in the last year. Gareth Hinds Drawing a graphic novel is kind of like making a whole film by yourself. After the rough layouts are edited and approved, I transfer them to big sheets of heavy paper and start drawing/painting the final illustrations. The challenges at this stage are basically the same as with any other kind of representational art; but there are a few special issues. I add the sound effects, speech balloons, and panel borders, digitally. This keeps them editable, in case there are copyedits or the book later gets translated into another language. Figure 18.6 Finished King Lear panels with balloons and sound effects. experience of being of a certain ethnicity or gender, we ought to approach YA literature with the same careful scrutiny, even if it is written about and to young adults rather than by them. It may seem, that I am speaking to the choir here; after all, this Handbook is evidence that there is a group of people who take YA literature very seriously. Space will not allow the extended close readings of the texts that literary critics favor and teachers encourage; instead my aim is to sow the seeds for further thinking about the many thematic dimensions at work in contemporary YA literature and the critical dialogues surrounding it. YA Literature in Secondary and Postsecondary Contexts In her 1996 article, “Young Adult Literature Evades the Theorists,” Caroline Hunt threw down a gauntlet of sorts to literary critics engaged in the teaching and study of YA literature. She called on critics to theorize their subject, to bring YA literature into the wider dialogue that had come to characterize the work of English departments, namely, literary and cultural theory. The definitive textbook in the field, Donelson and Nilsen’s (2008) Literature for Today’s Young Adults, first published in 1980 and in its eighth edition, provides exactly that material for preservice teachers and librarians. The focus in this text and these courses, as it is for most work done with literature in Education and Library Science, is on the interaction between texts and readers. To consider YA literature as a viable destination literature, the terms of traditional theoretical conversations surrounding the study of literature would need to be recast. YA Literature as a Destination Traditional methods of literary study, such as applied theoretical discussions of single texts or sets of texts using the various “isms” that have become standard fare in literary and cultural criticism, are a growing and necessary part of that critical conversation. I often teach Virginia Walter’s (1998) Making Up Megaboy in precisely those terms. In this mixed-genre, mixed media book, the main character is the decentered subject of postmodern discourse par excellence. We learn about the ways characters, people, are constructed through their actions and the way society views those actions, through the impressions of others which are always more than half embedded in narcissistic self-impressions, and through more nebulous and abstract cultural expectations that help us fill in gaps in our experience with prefabricated subject positions. Unpacking these last is often the most disturbing for readers, as in doing so they unearth unconscious prejudices that filter into our ways of perceiving the world. Contemporary YA literature, on the other hand, stages an up-to-the-minute confrontation with a mirror they can’t look away from, and makes moral, social, and cultural problems both accessible and urgent. What YA Literature Teaches Us about Itself I find it revealing that both McCallum and Trites look to Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism as key to the study and pedagogy of YA literature. Arnold Spirit, in Sherman Alexie’s (2007) The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, is self-consciously caught in the space between life on the rez, where he is brutally bullied and his future prospects are dim, and life among White people, which his best friend Rowdy reads as the ultimate betrayal of his heritage. He works out his identity by laying claim to a number of tribes to which he belongs: I realized that, sure, I was a Spokane Indian. Natalie, on the other hand, uses Tulip’s shocking cruelty as a way to distinguish herself as a good person; she builds her sense of self by objecting that part of her that identifies with and is fascinated by Tulip. She continues to need Tulip in her life to remind her where the lines are. It is itself dialogic—that is, it participates in the vibrant and constantly shifting cultural dialogue regarding what we value and how our lives might be lived both responsibly and responsively in the face of increasing globalization, perspective-altering technologies, and ideological challenge and change. To Grow or Not to Grow It is this quality of constantly changing cultural conditions and definitions, I suspect, more than the pedagogical sites of its dissemination, that makes YA literature tricky to theorize. To take an example from an emergent and as yet understudied national YA literature, critics of the recent explosion of Chinese books for young adults by young adults decry these books as unworthy of the tradition of Chinese literature because they are entertaining stories. Popular, these books, by a group of writers dubbed the “post-80s writers” because of when they were born, show no commitment to social issues or improving moral philosophy, nor are they very original. A large part of the success of these Chinese works of adolescent literature is due to the fact that they engage readers on an emotional level. This may be important for kids who have grown up without siblings to mirror and amplify, and validate, their emotional responses to the world, but it is a crucial factor for all teens as they develop the affective and imagistic aspects of their identity. Young adult fiction that considers extremes of emotion and focuses on impression management rather than challenging moral or social problems may not seem “serious” or overly invested in the project of growth toward maturity, but if viewed considering a more complex formulation of identity, one that takes into account emotions and image perception as well as ethical and intellectual development, it clearly deserves theoretical attention, if not traditional critical acclaim Claiming the Popular Like much pop cultural production, is unapologetically not engaging deep philosophical or moral truths, but rather working at the level of identification, emotional mirroring, and fantasy, all of which we hope teens will grow out of, or at impressions of her ex-husband and their life together in decidedly less romanticized terms. This makes for a strongly authentic narrative, as the voices of the characters correspond with the age, insight, and hindsight of the writer. Many contemporary vampire and monster novels, are deeply concerned with the ethical development of young adults. Their teen characters are cast as both the plague and its cure; their bodies are powerfully and potentially monstrous, but they have the ability and the responsibility to hold their power in check and use it for good. They are at a threshold of possibility, and the fate of the world rests on their ability to respond ethically and with restraint in the face of profound obstacles, including their own inner demons. The Best of Times Since human society continues to persist despite its crisis of faith in itself, it has had to develop new narratives, and these narratives bear within them the history of their construction; that is, they face the lack of perfection not as an incomplete state of development, but as an impossible dream, and adopt an ironic or wondering stance toward it. These narratives, ones intended for YA audiences, tend to express the belief that progress is possible if we can cultivate what Erik Erikson (1964) called the impulse of “generativity.” Erikson believed that “the fulfillment of...identity” (p. 131) manifests itself in the desire to reach out to others, to engage in the kind of selfless caring for others that we ourselves received in infancy. The very nature of the genre and its readership prevents the saying of any critical last word, and yet while the first critical words have been well-spoken, much remains to be articulated in this vibrant conversation. Markus Zusak It’s incredible the amount of times I’ve heard two writers chatting at a festival and have it start out with something like this: “So, what do you write?” “Oh...just Young Adult.”. It truly is an honor and a privilege to be a Young Adult writer, and for the depth of emotion within the hidden thoughts of our audience, but in the quality of authors who have come before us—who have raised the bar to such a distinguished level. We owe it to them, as much as to ourselves, to always make our goal simple and single-minded—to write someone’s favorite book. Hinton, if only for a moment, and it doesn’t get much better than that. Builds on previous work Yet, contemporary teen readers are increasingly more likely to seek out sequels, series, parodies, and books with familiar plot lines to meet their media-saturated libidinal needs. If you liked Twilight (Meyer, 2005), here are five books just like it, and they are overtly marketed that way. Differs from previous work. Chinese young adult literature, like much pop cultural production, is unapologetically not engaging deep philosophical or moral truths, but rather working at the level of identification, emotional mirroring, and fantasy, all of which we hope teens will grow out of, or at least come to view with some sort of mature perspective. A similar claim could be made for most popular YA lit produced in the United States, Britain, and Australia as well, which brings us to yet another problem in the theorization of YA literature: How does one think seriously about texts that are apt to have a short shelf life because their success depends on their responsiveness to a readership who are, by definition, in a state of flux? Should we only study those texts like Cormier’s (1974) The Chocolate War, Walter Dean Myers’s (1988) Fallen Angels, or Markus Zusak’s (2006) The Book Thief, which engage in weighty philosophical and ethical questions? Or should we find ways to think about the more ephemeral books, the ones that are widely read, but probably won’t outlast their generation? While books like Per Nilsson’s (2005) You & You & You scream symbolism! allegory! deep meaning! others like Jennifer Lynn Barnes’ (2008) The Squad series about cheerleaders who are also highly trained government operatives are just good fun. CHAPTER 25 Ideology and Children’s Books Robyn McCallum; John Stephens 2023 Ideologies are the systems of belief which are shared and used by a society to make sense of the world, and which pervade the talk and behaviors of a community, and form the basis of the social representations and practices of group members. No matter how simplistic it may appear, no book is innocent of ideological implications. Whether a text seeks to naturalize the belief systems of a culture or challenge them, it always places an ideological imposition on its readers, since ideology inheres in the very language and images from which it is made. Seeking to expose the implicit and explicit ideologies communicated through children’s texts has become the primary work of many of us who work with the genre, and we are indebted to the pioneering work of John Stephens and Robyn McCallum for helping us frame those investigations. Here John and Robyn look at current frameworks for exploring questions of ideology. Their arguments are reinforced by M. T. Anderson’s brilliant rendering of the questions faced by authors as they write in, around, though, in spite of, and sometimes in defense of their own conscious and unconscious ideological positions. Because children’s literature is persistently concerned with social issues and values, books may openly advocate attitudes or positions as desirable for readers to espouse. This possibility is perhaps most evident in books which deal thematically with gender or race. Particular utterances are affected by the elements which join them together into larger structures. These coherencies are of interest at two levels: first, at the level of linguistic features, such as the grammatical and other ties which combine sentences together into larger units; and second, at the level of elements often considered to be the domain of a more “literary” purpose—type of narrator, the implied reader who is constructed by the text, point of view, allusion and theme, for example —but which are inextricably bound up with discourse in some more precisely linguistic application. While readers may attribute quite different significances to a text according to their already held social attitudes and values—and for scholars this will be influenced by the kind of literary criticism they practice—such significance, unless entirely procrustean, emerges as a dialogue between the already-held subject position of a reader and the subject position(s) offered by the text. Ideology and Subject Position The concept of subject positions implied within texts is of crucial importance for reading and especially for examining a text’s possible ideological impact, because what such positions inevitably seek is reader alignment with or against the social attitudes and relationships that constitute the narrative. Wyile argues that in immediate-engaging first-person narration, in which the time of narration is close to or coincident with events narrated, and in which the narrator is the focalizer, readers align closely with the subjective experience of narrator- protagonists. It follows, that readers will be apt to align with the subject position, and social attitudes, occupied by such a protagonist. Reader alignment with characters in distancing narration is strong but intermittent, so the subject positions available to readers entail a greater awareness of how stories are imagined and narrated in relation to society’s values and attitudes. In this way, certain objectives and outcomes of the story are assumed to be commonsensically natural and desirable—for example, it is only to be expected that the main character of Gaiman’s (2008) The Graveyard Book, a child raised from infancy by ghosts in a graveyard, will grow up and find his place in the world of the living. His life course is a fantastic version of a normal social expectation and, as a culturally desirable outcome, it is not recognized as an element of social ideology but is rather presupposed and not textually asserted. Ideology and Imagination The ideology implicit in quite simple texts, usually in the form of assumed social structures and habits of thought, can be a powerful vehicle for affirming that “this is the way things are.” How a text begins is apt to involve an ideological orientation within the expected narrative orientation, as the following picture book beginning demonstrates: You think it’s easy being the tooth fairy? Well, it’s not. A mystery is thereby reduced to a legalism “(patent pending)” and a piece of contemporary slang (“scope out”), with the consequence that early childhood speculation and imagination is contained by means of a strong ideological assumption about what childhood should be. In her anthropological study of the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny within social practice in America, Cindy Dell Clark (1995) argues that belief in these immaterial beings has two important functions. The resultant dialogic relation between public discourse and personal expression is thereby instrumental in gaining assent from the implied community of address to “new” forms of subjective agency. Such dialogic strategies make possible interrogative relationships with the texts and genres of the past whereby the discourses of femininity informing fairy story, fantasy, and romance, for example, are made visible as socially constructed and ideologically shaped discourses. Subjective agency develops a different nuance when contextualized within notions of ambiguity, multiplicity, contradiction, and even transgression, where the becoming self will not be unified and its gender and sexual identity will remain fluid. Ideology and Transgression Representations of transgression more generally are an important way children’s literature makes ideologies apparent and seeks to redefine or even overthrow them. Kit’s Wilderness focuses on a specific and local setting to recuperate a dystopian past, while A Step from Heaven explores how the main character forges subjective agency out of displacement and subsequent resistance to hegemonic structures. Both novels envisage a world better than the everyday world the characters inhabit, and as such belong to a large body of children’s fiction from the early 1990s to the present in which utopian tropes are evident either within constructions of fantastic or realistic worlds or implied through their opposites in dystopian narratives. Narrative fictions function as models of everyday life experience in the lived world Conclusion The concept of subject positions implied within texts is of crucial importance for reading and especially for examining a text’s possible ideological impact, because what such positions inevitably seek is reader alignment with or against the social attitudes and relationships that constitute the narrative. A key expression of imagination is in the creativity of represented characters, especially its capacity to articulate the connection of creativity with agency as a force for expressing emotions and making responsible judgments based on intersubjective relations. CHAPTER 35 The Economics of Children's Book Publishing in the 21st Century Joel Taxel 2023 Prior to the mid-20th century, Canadian national identity was an amalgam of French, British, and American values and cultures, and tensions between them had existed since the 18th century Joel Taxel has long been for looking at children’s literature with a critical eye —an eye keen to discern the subtle and not-so-subtle issues surrounding multiculturalism in children’s literature. More recently, he has turned his gaze to the globalization of children’s literature, questioning the combination of conglomerates and commercialization in literature for the young. From Harry Potter promoting Coca- Cola to Madonna’s foray into the children’s book world, Taxel reveals the merchandizing emphasis on controlling consumption from birth to the beyond, with less focus on the aesthetic quality of texts than on the bottom line. Still, Taxel argues that it would be “an error to examine cultural phenomena without reference to human agency.” Several editors and publishers are devoted to producing books of “breathtaking quality” with new and challenging visions for children, and children, who can be quite discerning themselves, are eager to take them up. Findings By 1964, the Labour Government in Britain had increased school and public library funding by 30% (Tucker, 1998), and, while business considerations alone justified this financial support, children’s needs clearly were central considerations in fostering the development of children’s collections and child-friendly library environments (Reynolds, 1998). Highlights • Joel Taxel has long been for looking at children’s literature with a critical eye — an eye keen to discern the subtle and not-so-subtle issues surrounding multiculturalism in children’s literature. • Prior to the mid-20th century, Canadian national identity was an amalgam of French, British, and American values and cultures, and tensions between them had existed since the 18th century. • “Double colonial burden-dependence on Britain and on the U.S.” (Bainbridge & Wolodko, 2002, p. 21). Seeking to transcend this history and develop a distinctive national identity, Canadians in the latter part of the 20th century created a national canon, a development fostered by subsidies from the Canadian federal government (Bainbridge & Wolodko, 2002; Stan, 1999). • Engelhardt (1991) argues: The descent of adult methods into children’s publishing has meant the descent of junior versions of distinctly adult genres—the TV soap opera, the woman’s romance, and the thriller—deeper and deeper into the world of childhood; and with them, a certain generic sameness has blanketed bestseller Dom. (p. 60). The veracity of this claim is seen in the announcement that Harlequin, known for its adult romances, has entered the YA market with a new trade paperback imprint aimed at African American teenage girls, a group of readers the publisher says is underserved by commercial fiction. Summary Setting the Stage The past several decades has witnessed momentous changes in the global children’s book business. The shifting political and ideological landscape that led to the U.S Supreme Court’s 1954 decision outlawing segregation in schools gave impetus to the nascent civil rights movement, helped focus attention on what Larrick (1972) famously termed the “all-white world of children’s books,” and provided the impetus for passage of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act which infused money to American school and public libraries. This landmark legislation created, for the first time, a viable market for books about Black children (Marcus, 1997). The focus here instead is on the seismic, world-wide shifts in the economic realm whereby the book publishing industry, as well as newspapers, magazines, television and radio stations, film, and record companies, etc., have been absorbed and integrated into giant multinational media corporations whose business practices are transforming the production and consumption of children’s literature and popular culture around the world. We calculate what is best for our children by regarding them as investments and turning them into commodities” (p. ix). Economic Power and Individual Agency The pursuit of a political economy of children’s literature runs the risk of falling into the trap of economic determinism that often is endemic in analyses seeking to determine the impact of impersonal macroeconomic forces on cultural institutions, be they schools or publishing companies (e.g., Apple, 1982; Williams, 1977). Among the most persistent and vexing of these problems is to lose sight of the agency of the social actors involved. It is easy, for example, to reduce the women and men working in publishing to helpless pawns in the face of changes wrought when transnational conglomerates assume control of the companies in which they work. Hagood (2001) spoke of the widely held belief that “the culture industry socializes people in common ways by exposing them to mindless drivel” (p. 254). This belief fosters the notion that “people lack the ability to interpret for themselves the messages that mass media produce” and that these messages are “duping them” and doing “little to improve their minds or status in society” (Alvermann, 2006, p. 243). We must remember that children actively construct meaning and do not robotically internalize whatever messages are placed in front of them, or that writers and editors are hapless victims in the face of monolithic economic forces. Marketing and Merchandizing The concept of the child as a consumer emerged in 18th-century England and was central to the consumer revolution that affected all aspects of English life. It was at this time that John Newbery, widely regarded as one of the founders of modern children’s literature, initiated practices to enhance the sale of his books that are the forebears of those that pervade today’s global children’s culture industry. The year 1949 marked the launch of Les Petits Livres d’Or, French-language editions of Little Golden Books, and the final plans for foreign editions in Spain, Italy, and Germany (Marcus, 2007). These forebears of today’s ubiquitous efforts to capitalize on and promote the popularity of characters from popular books make it clear that today’s marketers have several centuries of precedent and experience to build on. Available for license was Maurice Sendak’s (1964) classic Where the Wild Things Are (Raugust, 2007). Authors as Brands The practice of establishing books and their characters as brands that will attract readers, viewers, and consumers of ancillary products extends to authors. Publishers have learned that licensed books, films, and their ancillary products do best in mass-market stores such as K-Mart, Wall-Mart, Costco, etc. As a result, these outlets are increasing space devoted to children’s titles, improving their in-store displays, and expanding their selection beyond what were once very narrow parameters (Holt, 2004). Other critics fear that if a book sells because its author is a celebrity, the distinction between quality and popularity is blurred. Such books perpetuate the misconception that anyone can write a children’s book. Jane Yolen believes that “celebrity children’s books eat up all the available oxygen” (MacPherson, 2004, n.p.). Series and Sequels I have discussed some of the ways that publishers seek to brand their authors in order to exploit their name recognition and attract steady and repetitive sales. As Catherine Sheldrick Ross points out in her chapter in this volume, children’s book publishing has a long and quite lucrative mass-market side that includes the dime novels of the 19th century and later series such as the Rover Boys, the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, and Nancy Drew, which have been updated for contemporary audiences (Marcus, 1997). In their heyday, children’s librarians banished many of these series, as well as the Little Golden Books, from numerous collections. The veracity of this claim is seen in the announcement that Harlequin, known for its adult romances, has entered the YA market with a new trade paperback imprint aimed at African American teenage girls, a group of readers the publisher says is underserved by commercial fiction. Findings By 1964, the Labour Government in Britain had increased school and public library funding by 30% (Tucker, 1998), and, while business considerations alone justified this financial support, children’s needs clearly were central considerations in fostering the development of children’s collections and child-friendly library environments (Reynolds, 1998). Looking Ahead Consideration of the socioeconomic issues related to children’s literature and culture no longer is a novelty. These discussions provide us with greater awareness and understanding of the relation between economic forces and the books available to our children. Writing almost 30 years ago, Whiteside (1980) alluded to this point when paying tribute to the handful of editors and publishers “who have shown themselves determined to maintain their standards of excellence and their encouragement of new writing talent.” He retained the belief that “even within the most seemingly monolithic companies there are individual editors whose professional skill and energy and devotion to literature are such that they have been able to establish, in effect, their own imprints within these companies”. We are not powerless and can and must foster the development of critical literacies and be unyielding in our commitment to promoting the kinds of books and reading experiences that led us here in the first place. CHAPTER 36 Toys, Television, Tie-Ins, and Technology Margaret Mackey 2023 The simplest and most important conclusion from this collection of research is that we have an enormous amount yet to learn When literature becomes marketable both for its stories and its adaptability across mediums and media, one outcome is certainly increased profits and motivation to secure readers’ interests and loyalty, as Joel Taxel describes in the preceding chapter. Another outcome, as Margaret Mackey argues, is expanded opportunities for retelling, reshaping, and revaluing a story’s original form, content, and audience. In a reach across disciplines, Mackey outlines the questions raised by the “slipperiness” of stories for authors, publishers, educators, and researchers, who all want to know how readers—especially the generation of children who know books as commodities— understand and engage with multiple story forms. While multinational and