Rereading Childhood Books: A Poetics (Bloomsbury Perspectives on Children's Literature)

2019 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title and shortlisted for the ESSE book awards 2020, for Literatures in the English Language Childhood books play a special role in reading histories, providing touchstones for our future tastes and giving shape to our ongoing identities. Bringing the latest work in Memory Studies to bear on writers' memoirs, autobiographical accounts of reading, and interviews with readers, Rereading Childhood Books explores how adults remember, revisit, and sometimes forget, these significant books. Asking what it means to return to familiar works by well-known authors such as Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis and Enid Blyton, as well as popular and ephemeral material not often considered as part of the canon, Alison Waller develops a poetics of rereading and presents a new model for understanding lifelong reading. As such she reconceives the history of children's literature through the shared and individual experiences of the readers who carry these books with them throughout their lives. Cover Half title Series page Title Copyrights Dedication Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Excavating Paracanons and the lifelong reading act Nostalgia, memoirs and re-memorying Experiments in rereading Rereading Childhood Books: A Poetics 1 The reading scene Memory and the reading scene Childhood reading and reminiscence Childhood books and recollection Rereading and recognition Reconstructing through rereading Conclusion 2 The life space The life space and autotopography Co-reading Learning to read School and home Reading spaces Mapping reading Conclusion 3 Affective traces Affective traces and resonance Pleasures Passions Grief Fear Desire and boredom Conclusion 4 Rereading attitudes The uses of childhood books and rereading attitudes Nostalgia Rereading with children As scholars Understanding literary life Conclusion 5 Transforming, misremembering, forgetting Transformed texts Material mismatches Translations and transmediations Memory errors and misremembering Forgetting and anamnesis Conclusion Conclusion: The lifelong reading act Future directions Final words Appendix: Participants Notes Bibliography Index "Childhood books play a special role in reading histories, providing touchstones for our future tastes and giving shape to our ongoing identities. Bringing the latest work in Memory Studies to bear on writers' memoirs, autobiographical accounts of reading, and interviews with readers, Rereading Childhood Books explores how adults remember, revisit, and sometimes forget, these significant books. Asking what it means to return to familiar works by well-known authors such as Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis and Enid Blyton, as well as popular and ephemeral material not often considered as part of the canon, Alison Waller develops a poetics of rereading and presents a new model for understanding lifelong reading. As such she reconceives the history of children's literature through the shared and individual experiences of the readers who carry these books with them throughout their lives."--Bloomsbury Publishing. "Childhood books play a special role in reading histories, providing touchstones for our future tastes and giving shape to our ongoing identities. Bringing the latest work in Memory Studies to bear on writers' memoirs, autobiographical accounts of reading, and interviews with readers, Rereading Childhood Books explores how adults remember, revisit, and sometimes forget, these significant books. Asking what it means to return to familiar works by well-known authors such as Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis and Enid Blyton, as well as popular and ephemeral material not often considered as part of the canon, Alison Waller develops a poetics of rereading and presents a new model for understanding lifelong reading. As such she reconceives the history of children's literature through the shared and individual experiences of the readers who carry these books with them throughout their lives"-- Provided by publisher