Reading Children

Patricia Crain is Professor of English at New York University and author of The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter.

"Reading Children is capacious but rigorous, bringing entirely fresh ways of thinking about what may have seemed like well-trodden material. Crain's prose is precise, clear, and quite often entertaining, and her research is extraordinary." (Modern Philology) "The strengths of this lavishly illustrated study, which includes thirty-five color plates and forty-five black-and-white illustrations, are the evocative, perceptive, and compelling discussions of the relationship between children's reading and property. . . . Crain braids together close analyses of texts, artifacts, and significant contemporary ideas to provide a multidimensional historical account of children's reading that contextualizes the idealized representation that we have come to associate with childhood." (Children's Literature Association Quarterly) "Crain's study makes significant contributions to studies of childhood reading practices and spaces. Her examination of reading in controlled and regulated schoolroom environments as well as private, familial environments adds to current understandings of how public and private scenes of reading and the material culture of books and the spaces in which to read books shape and define childhood." (HIstory of Education Quarterly) "[A] fascinating, wide-ranging study of the ways in which the figure of the child reader-in particular, the image of a child reading his or her own book-has been intertwined in broader cultural narratives about selfhood, memory, commodity ownership, and economic and cultural capital." (Reception) "Patricia Crain has long been one of the handful of scholars whose work I have found truly transformative, changing my sense of the kinds of questions one could ask and of the strategies one might develop for answering them. Reading Children is capacious, precise, and at times breathtakingly original in its vision and methods." (Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Amherst College)

• Introduction. Children and BooksChapter 1. Literacy, Commodities, and Cultural Capital: The Case of Goody Two-ShoesChapter 2. The Literary Property of Childhood: The Case of the "Babes in the Wood"Chapter 3. Colonizing Childhood, Placing Cherokee ChildrenChapter 4. "Selling a Boy": Race, Class, and the Literacy Economy of ChildhoodChapter 5. Children in the MarginsChapter 6. Raising "Master James": The Medial Child and Phantasms of ReadingCoda. Bedtime StoriesAppendix. "The Children in the Wood"NotesBibliographyIndexAcknowledgments