Playful Texts and the Emergent Reader: Developing Metalinguistic Awareness by Anne Plummer (review)

We are ushered into this book about the potential of playful texts with a warm welcome that comes straight from the opening pages of Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s famous picture book, The Jolly Pocket Postman. “Dear Reader!” it begins, “Enclosed you’ll find a useful lens. It’s in here—take a look!” (1). Indeed, Anne Plummer’s informative text does offer its readers a “useful lens,” in that it provides us with a helpful perspective from which to regard, or reconsider, the multifaceted and often underappreciated relationship between play—and playful texts—and the development of young children as readers and thinkers.

Aimed primarily at teachers, students and scholars who may be relatively new to the field of children’s literature and literacies, Anne Plummer’s text is underpinned by a drive to celebrate and share the benefits of reading playful texts. According to her quite specific definition, a playful text is one that “plays on words and/or images in the same way that children play in games of make believe, transforming the everyday world of common sense meaning into a self-reflexive play world which works to disclose, and subvert, the rules which sustain it” (2). As Plummer notes in the introduction, such texts tend to delight in the chaotic pursuit of multiple, sometimes contradictory plot lines; are often narrated by disruptive and unreliable storytellers; and frequently invite readers to toy with their linguistic and literary assumptions about how books—and language—ought to work. Consequently, Plummer makes an explicit connection between the texts she has labeled as textually playful and the concept of metafiction, an approach or set of devices that is said to interrupt or undermine readers’ expectations by deliberately drawing attention to the “artifice of fiction” or the constructedness of a text (Pantaleo 212). In fact, the extent of this connection is such that Plummer uses the terms “playful” and “metafictive” interchangeably, describing playful texts as “essentially metafictive” in nature (2), a conflation that I return to in the later stages of this review.

As Margaret Mackey has noted, an effect of metafiction can be to create readers who are able to approach the act of reading with a more “reflective and detached awareness of how the processes of fiction are operating … they are simultaneously caught up in the story and standing back from it, watching it work” (179). Although Mackey is not cited, it is this heightened awareness of meaning-making as a process that Plummer is also interested in, and a central premise of this book is that young readers’ engagement with “playful metafiction” (69), a conjoined phrase that emerges in the latter stages of the argument, can create opportunities for crucial developments of a metalinguistic and/or metacognitive nature. In Plummer’s own words, these can be equated with “the ability to identify and talk about the properties of language” (1).

The positive stance that Plummer has adopted toward metafiction builds on significant work in this field by picture book and children’s literature scholars such as Mackey, but also that of Lawrence R. Sipe, Sylvia Pantaleo, David Lewis, and Frank Serafini, whose work with younger readers is acknowledged and signposted via a series of vignettes, or case studies, which appear in the final chapter. While these critics have often used metafiction or postmodernism as the prism through which to scrutinize children’s texts, Plummer’s contribution has been to approach the texts from a perspective that puts the concept of play, rather than metafiction, first. Given her background as a Montessori-trained teacher, Plummer’s interest in the productive power of play is not surprising, and it is this influence that provides the book with much of its overarching structure.

Having briefly outlined her perspective in the introductory pages, in chapter 2 Plummer starts to assemble a theoretical “pro-play” argument that begins with a discussion of the developmental origins of pretend play—or make believe—and makes reference to the theories of Jerome...