Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Digital Literature for Children: Texts, Readers and Educational Practices ed. by Mireia Manresa, Neus Real
Much cultural anxiety surrounds the recent proliferation of tablet computers and their subsequent use by young children. At the same time, numerous apps and other digital narratives claim to offer unique and engaging experiences for readers of all ages. Mireia Manresa and Neus Real’s essay collection on digital literature for young readers is an important [End Page 344] addition to the conversation surrounding this aspect of children’s literature and culture. Scholarship on digital literature for young readers or children’s electronic literature (e-lit) draws from a variety of disciplines, as exemplified in this collection, a combination of work done on children’s and adolescents’ digital literary education by the GRETEL research group at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and scholarship by a variety of international scholars. By looking at three domains—texts, readers, and in-school and out-of-school contexts—this collection of essays seeks to “study the changes that digital literature has introduced in the production of fiction addressed to children and adolescents, in the reading reception of this population group and in the reading habits that usually take place in family and school situations” (10). The thirteen essays grouped into five sections ultimately contribute an insightful and valuable introduction to this topic.
The first section of the book, “Contextualization and Theoretical Framework,” contains two chapters that bring together a wealth of scholarship related to digital literature for young readers. Laura Borràs’s brief chapter explores the varied spaces of digital reading, while Lucas Ramada Prieto’s essay offers a thorough look into the existing scholarship on digital literature. Drawing on an astounding variety of both scholarship and examples of digital literature for young readers, Ramada Prieto constructs an especially useful framework for theorizing children’s electronic literature; together, the two chapters provide a compelling argument for shifting our understanding of digital literature for young readers.
“Digital Literature for Children and Young Adults,” the second section of the book, turns explicitly to the texts themselves. Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer explores the ways in which digital forms are unique in their content and narrative structure and provides a brief introduction to fanfiction as digital children’s literature. Junko Yokota looks explicitly at picture books, chronicling the past developments in print volumes that may have influenced the kinds of interaction used in digital versions, providing an overview of the current state of digital picture books, and, briefly, speculating on future developments. In contrast to the broad approach taken by both of these authors, Celia Turrión Penelas presents a focused analysis of thirty different narrative apps, offering an insightful critique of their complexity, interactivity, and literary qualities.
From here, the collection turns to readers and draws largely from the work done through the GRETEL research group at UAB. “Readers and Digital Literature” contains three chapters that each explore a different research study looking at the digital reading experiences of children and adolescents. Manresa opens this section with a study of the ways in which children and adolescents perceive and interpret digital texts. The study looks at five groups of young readers and how they responded to one of five digital narratives, including Kate Pullinger’s Inanimate Alice and Oliver Jeffers’s The Heart and the Bottle. In the [End Page 345] following chapter, Ramada Prieto and Lara Reyes López compare the analog reading profiles (the variety and type of texts read, reading fluency, attitude toward reading, and so on) of four eleven- and twelve-year-old students with their digital reading profiles. Their findings suggest that “electronic literature sustains certain more ludic and exploratory attitudes during the act of reading, both for the traditionally strong readers as well as for those that did not see this possibility in the printed corpus” (135). Lastly, Martina Fittipaldi, Anna Juan, and Manresa’s “Paper or Digital: A Comparative Reading with Teenagers of a Poe Short Story” turns to adolescent readers through a comparison of how these...
