Richly illustrated with often antic images from alphabet books and primers, The Story of A relates the history of the alphabet as a genre of text for children and of alphabetization as a social practice in America, from early modern reading primers to the literature of the American Renaissance. Offering a poetics of alphabetization and explicating the alphabet's tropes and rhetorical strategies, the author demonstrates the far-reaching cultural power of such apparently neutral statements as -A is for apple.- The new market for children's books in the eighteenth century established for...
Richly illustrated with often antic images from alphabet books and primers, The Story of A relates the history of the alphabet as a genre of te...
Richly illustrated with often antic images from alphabet books and primers, The Story of A relates the history of the alphabet as a genre of text for children and of alphabetization as a social practice in America, from early modern reading primers to the literature of the American Renaissance. Offering a poetics of alphabetization and explicating the alphabet's tropes and rhetorical strategies, the author demonstrates the far-reaching cultural power of such apparently neutral statements as "A is for apple." The new market for children's books in the eighteenth century established for...
Richly illustrated with often antic images from alphabet books and primers, The Story of A relates the history of the alphabet as a genre of te...
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...
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 <...
