Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America (Material Texts) Book PDF, ePub eBook

Join our eBook service for unlimited books & audiobooks. Get a free 7 day subscription! ↓↓↓↓↓


Book Descriptions:

What does it mean for a child to be a "reader" and how did American culture come to place such a high value on this identity? Reading Children offers a history of the relationship between children and books in Anglo-American modernity, exploring long-lived but now forgotten early children's literature, discredited yet highly influential pedagogical practices, the property lessons inherent in children's book ownership, and the emergence of childhood itself as a literary property.

The nursery and schoolroom version of the social contract, Crain argues, underwrote children's entry not only into reading and writing but also into a world of commodity and property relations. Increasingly positioned as an indispensable form of cultural capital by the end of the eighteenth century, literacy became both the means and the symbol of children's newly recognized self-possession and autonomy. At the same time, as children's legal and economic status was changing, "childhood" emerged as an object of nostalgia for adults. Literature for children enacted the terms of children's self-possession, often with explicit references to property, contracts, or inheritances, and yet also framed adult longing for an imagined past called "childhood."

Dozens of colorful illustrations chart the ways in which early literature for children was transformed into spectacle through new image technologies and a burgeoning marketplace that capitalized on nostalgic fantasies of childhood conflated with bowdlerized fantasies of history. Reading Children offers new terms for thinking about the imbricated and mutually constitutive histories of literacy, property, and childhood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that ground current anxieties and long-held beliefs about childhood and reading.

Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America (Material Texts) by Patricia Crain

From reader reviews:

Walter Reeves:

The experience that you get from Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America (Material Texts) could be the more deep you excavating the information that hide into the words the more you get thinking about reading it. It does not mean that this book is hard to know but Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America (Material Texts) giving you thrill feeling of reading. The copy writer conveys their point in specific way that can be understood simply by anyone who read it because the author of this book is well-known enough. This particular book also makes your vocabulary increase well. That makes it easy to understand then can go along with you, both in printed or e-book style are available. We highly recommend you for having that Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America (Material Texts) instantly.

Mia Shaw:

Hey guys, do you wishes to finds a new book to see? May be the book with the name Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America (Material Texts) suitable to you? The particular book was written by renowned writer in this era. Often the book untitled Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America (Material Texts)is the main of several books that everyone read now. This particular book was inspired many men and women in the world. When you read this publication you will enter the new dimensions that you ever know before. The author explained their idea in the simple way, therefore all of people can easily to be aware of the core of this book. This book will give you a great deal of information about this world now. To help you see the represented of the world on this book.

Loretta Manson:

The reserve untitled Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America (Material Texts) is the book that recommended to you to study. You can see the quality of the reserve content that will be shown to a person. The language that publisher use to explained their ideas are easily to understand. The writer was did a lot of research when write the book, hence the information that they share to you personally is absolutely accurate. You also could get the e-book of Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America (Material Texts) from the publisher to make you considerably more enjoy free time.

Blair Gant:

Reading a book for being new life style in this 12 months; every people loves to study a book. When you study a book you can get a lot of benefit. When you read books, you can improve your knowledge, since book has a lot of information in it. The information that you will get depend on what forms of book that you have read. If you need to get information about your research, you can read education books, but if you want to entertain yourself you are able to a fiction books, such us novel, comics, in addition to soon. The Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America (Material Texts) will give you a new experience in reading a book.