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

Patricia Crain

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press 2016

Reading Children

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

Patricia Crain

In the series Material Texts

https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812292848

Overview
Contents

About this book

Reading Children offers a history of the relationship between children and books in Anglo-American modernity, exploring early children's literature, pedagogical practices, property lessons inherent in children's book ownership, and the emergence of childhood itself as a literary property.

Author / Editor information

Patricia Crain is Professor of English at New York University and author of The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter.

Reviews

"The strengths of this lavishly illustrated study, which includes thirty-five color plates and forty-five black-and-white illustrations, are the evocative, perceptive, and compelling discussions of the relationship between children's reading and property. . . . Crain braids together close analyses of texts, artifacts, and significant contemporary ideas to provide a multidimensional historical account of children's reading that contextualizes the idealized representation that we have come to associate with childhood."—Children's Literature Association Quarterly

"Patricia Crain has long been one of the handful of scholars whose work I have found truly transformative, changing my sense of the kinds of questions one could ask and of the strategies one might develop for answering them. Reading Children is capacious, precise, and at times breathtakingly original in its vision and methods."—Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Amherst College

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction. Children and Books Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter 1. Literacy, Commodities, and Cultural Capital: The Case of Goody Two-Shoes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
Chapter 2. The Literary Property of Childhood: The Case of the ‘‘Babes in the Wood’’ Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	43
Chapter 3. Colonizing Childhood, Placing Cherokee Children Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	62
Chapter 4. ‘‘Selling a Boy’’: Race, Class, and the Literacy Economy of Childhood Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	89
Chapter 5. Children in the Margins Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	109
Chapter 6. Raising ‘‘Master James’’: The Medial Child and Phantasms of Reading Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	144
Coda. Bedtime Stories Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171
Appendix. ‘‘The Children in the Wood’’ Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	177
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	181
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	223
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	239
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	245

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 280
Illustrations
- Other: 35 color, 45 b/w illus.
Keywords: Literature; Cultural Studies

eBook

Published: May 2, 2016
ISBN: 9780812292848