Reading Children

Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America

Fiction & Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, American, Books & Reading
Cover of the book Reading Children by Patricia Crain, University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart
Author: Patricia Crain ISBN: 9780812292848
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc. Publication: May 2, 2016
Imprint: University of Pennsylvania Press Language: English
Author: Patricia Crain
ISBN: 9780812292848
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication: May 2, 2016
Imprint: University of Pennsylvania Press
Language: English

What does it mean for a child to be a "reader" and how did American culture come to place such a high value on this identity? Reading Children offers a history of the relationship between children and books in Anglo-American modernity, exploring long-lived but now forgotten early children's literature, discredited yet highly influential pedagogical practices, the property lessons inherent in children's book ownership, and the emergence of childhood itself as a literary property.

The nursery and schoolroom version of the social contract, Crain argues, underwrote children's entry not only into reading and writing but also into a world of commodity and property relations. Increasingly positioned as an indispensable form of cultural capital by the end of the eighteenth century, literacy became both the means and the symbol of children's newly recognized self-possession and autonomy. At the same time, as children's legal and economic status was changing, "childhood" emerged as an object of nostalgia for adults. Literature for children enacted the terms of children's self-possession, often with explicit references to property, contracts, or inheritances, and yet also framed adult longing for an imagined past called "childhood."

Dozens of colorful illustrations chart the ways in which early literature for children was transformed into spectacle through new image technologies and a burgeoning marketplace that capitalized on nostalgic fantasies of childhood conflated with bowdlerized fantasies of history. Reading Children offers new terms for thinking about the imbricated and mutually constitutive histories of literacy, property, and childhood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that ground current anxieties and long-held beliefs about childhood and reading.

View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart

What does it mean for a child to be a "reader" and how did American culture come to place such a high value on this identity? Reading Children offers a history of the relationship between children and books in Anglo-American modernity, exploring long-lived but now forgotten early children's literature, discredited yet highly influential pedagogical practices, the property lessons inherent in children's book ownership, and the emergence of childhood itself as a literary property.

The nursery and schoolroom version of the social contract, Crain argues, underwrote children's entry not only into reading and writing but also into a world of commodity and property relations. Increasingly positioned as an indispensable form of cultural capital by the end of the eighteenth century, literacy became both the means and the symbol of children's newly recognized self-possession and autonomy. At the same time, as children's legal and economic status was changing, "childhood" emerged as an object of nostalgia for adults. Literature for children enacted the terms of children's self-possession, often with explicit references to property, contracts, or inheritances, and yet also framed adult longing for an imagined past called "childhood."

Dozens of colorful illustrations chart the ways in which early literature for children was transformed into spectacle through new image technologies and a burgeoning marketplace that capitalized on nostalgic fantasies of childhood conflated with bowdlerized fantasies of history. Reading Children offers new terms for thinking about the imbricated and mutually constitutive histories of literacy, property, and childhood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that ground current anxieties and long-held beliefs about childhood and reading.

More books from University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.

Cover of the book Irish Folk History by Patricia Crain
Cover of the book Recipes for Thought by Patricia Crain
Cover of the book Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden by Patricia Crain
Cover of the book The Listener's Voice by Patricia Crain
Cover of the book Backwoods Utopias by Patricia Crain
Cover of the book Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster by Patricia Crain
Cover of the book The Romance of Adultery by Patricia Crain
Cover of the book The Late Byzantine Army by Patricia Crain
Cover of the book The Negro in the Textile Industry by Patricia Crain
Cover of the book The Roman Inquisition by Patricia Crain
Cover of the book Blue-Collar Broadway by Patricia Crain
Cover of the book American Marriage by Patricia Crain
Cover of the book Blind Impressions by Patricia Crain
Cover of the book John Capgrave's Fifteenth Century by Patricia Crain
Cover of the book Jennie Gerhardt by Patricia Crain
We use our own "cookies" and third party cookies to improve services and to see statistical information. By using this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy