Mediation and Children's Reading

How, and what, children and young adults read are questions bound up with both aspirations and concerns. This book brings together experts from a range of academic disciplines to examine how this reading has been mediated in Anglo-American contexts. Reading Mediation explores mediation across case studies of different reading experiences, practices and modes: It considers social and solitary reading; it analyzes ideas of text-reader interaction through book design and textual strategies; and it examines methods readers use for orienting themselves in relation to the text. Throughout it interrogates how values and assumptions about the effects of reading are implicated in its mediation, underpinning book collections, programmatic and parental intervention and facilitation of reading as well as the study of children's reading and literature. Employing a variety of methodologies, the essays elaborate how using "mediation" as a connecting node of analysis promotes interdisciplinary dialogue, and they demonstrate its value as a critical term for the study of children's reading, literacy and print culture.

“The interdisciplinary and methodologically varied approaches in this timely collection explore and seek to theorize various ways Anglophone childhood reading is mediated through programmatic interventions, textual features, and the web of adult/reader/text interactions. These engaging essays will inspire researchers in children's literature and cultural studies to view reading practices with greater depth and nuance.”

This is a wonderfully wide-ranging set of essays exploring how children's reading experiences have been shaped, across three centuries, by changing pedagogies and understandings of childhood, by social policy and publishers' strategies, and by the institutions and individuals that provide children's access to books. Ranging from the eighteenth century to the present, these essays challenge us, in whichever disciplines we work, to develop new methods of understanding children's reading practices, and always to question our assumptions about how different children read, and what effects their reading can have.

Anne Marie Hagen is associate professor of English at the Norwegian Defence University College, Oslo, Norway.

How, and what, children and young adults read are questions bound up with both aspirations and concerns. This book brings together experts from a range of academic disciplines to examine how this reading has been mediated in Anglo-American contexts. Reading Mediation explores mediation across case studies of different reading experiences, practices and modes: It considers social and solitary reading; it analyzes ideas of text-reader interaction through book design and textual strategies; and it examines methods readers use for orienting themselves in relation to the text. Throughout it interrogates how values and assumptions about the effects of reading are implicated in its mediation, underpinning book collections, programmatic and parental intervention and facilitation of reading as well as the study of children's reading and literature. Employing a variety of methodologies, the essays elaborate how using "mediation" as a connecting node of analysis promotes interdisciplinary dialogue, and they demonstrate its value as a critical term for the study of children's reading, literacy and print culture.

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