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  • The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture: Theorizing Books for Beginning Readers ed. by Jennifer M. Miskec and Annette Wannamaker
  • Ivy Linton Stabell (bio)
The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture: Theorizing Books for Beginning Readers, edited by Jennifer M. Miskec and Annette Wannamaker. New York: Routledge, 2016.

The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture opens with former Children’s Literature Association Quarterly editor Katharine Capshaw Smith’s 2013 call for the field of children’s literature to attend to its underexamined areas of study; “consider the ‘early reader’ genre,” Capshaw Smith writes (qtd. in Miskec 1). Anyone who has taught a survey course in children’s literature will recognize this gap in the scholarship. For the picture books, graphic novels, periodicals, and novels we teach, there are authoritative histories and theoretical studies to include on course reading lists and to review in class preparation. Yet the books directed at new readers have received only scattershot attention from literary critics. For the student or scholar researching Elephant and Piggie, Captain Underpants, Ivy and Bean, and their ilk, there are only a few studies dedicated to specific Early Readers and none, until now, that address the genre as literature. This is the critical void Jennifer Miskec and Annette Wannamaker step in to fill with their valuable new collection of essays on Early Readers.

The central goal of Miskec and Wannamaker’s collection is to rescue Early Readers from their reputation as utilitarian and disposable works of “paraliterature,” and to argue, instead, that these works are significant as young readers’ “first opportunity to engage with a work of literature on their own, to feel a sense of mastery over a text, and ideally to experience pleasure from the act of beginning to read independently” (1, 1–2). To explain Early Readers’ reputation as merely functional texts, meant to be used and dismissed from the bookshelf, Miskec and Wannamaker’s introduction points to the genre’s close association with the [End Page 260] practical goals of literacy instruction and the market glut of cheaply made, mass-produced paperbacks created to supply every stage of this learning process. To remedy these misunderstood books’ standing, Miskec and Wannamaker reframe the Early Reader as a genre with distinct origins, with unique aesthetic aims and conventions, and as cultural artifacts that initiate child readers into ideological systems and reflect cultural attitudes toward children at this specific developmental moment. The Early Reader’s location at the site of the new reader’s nascent independence from (some) adult mediation is crucial to the identity of the Early Reader this collection presents. Early Readers, Miskec and Wannamaker argue, “tell us much about our conflicted notions and anxieties about children as independent agents, who are thinking and literate. And they are eligible for the same critical and analytical treatment as texts for older child readers” (9). Echoing the claims that children’s literature scholars have long made about the significance of literature for young readers to cultural ideas of childhood, power, agency, identity, and authority, this collection defends Early Readers as legitimate objects of study that can, as a distinct genre and as an important part of children’s literature as a whole, enhance our understanding of these critical concepts.

The book is divided into four sections, the first of which, “History,” locates the origins and development of the Early Reader within the larger trajectory of children’s literature in the United States. Ramona Caponegro’s “From the New England Primer to The Cat in the Hat: Big Steps in the Growth and Development of Early Readers” begins with the New England Primer, its images and moral lessons newly considered here as forerunner to the Early Reader. Tracking this and later shifts in publishing for beginning readers, from the emphasis on extended narrative in Jacob Abbott’s Rollo books, to the move to reflecting everyday (white middle-class) life in Dick and Jane readers, and finally to the desire for more compelling narrative in The Cat in the Hat and the Little Bear books, Camponegro argues that “the continual quest to make reading instruction more palatable and enjoyable,” without fully replacing earlier forms...

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