Mediation and Children’s Reading

Striving to develop interdisciplinary dialogue, the essays in this work explore children’s and young adult reading through the theoretical lens of "mediation." They interrogate how values and assumptions about the effects of reading underpin reading practices, facilitation of reading and the study of reading, literature and print culture.

This collection of essays explores the cultural significance of children’s reading by analyzing a series of Anglo-American case studies from the eighteenth century to the present. Marked by historical continuity and technological change, children’s reading proves to be a phenomenon with broad influence, one that shapes both the development of individual readers and wider social values. The essays in this volume capture such complexity by invoking the conception of “mediation” to approach children’s reading as a site of interaction among individual people, material texts, and institutional networks. Featuring a range of scholarly perspectives from the disciplines of literature, education, graphic design, and library and information science, this collection uncovers both the intricacies and wider stakes of children’s reading. The books, public programs, and archives that focus explicitly on children’s interests and needs are powerful arenas that give expression to the key ideological investments of a culture.

Introduction. “Mediation: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Studying Reading”

Anne Marie Hagen

Part I – Historical Reading Practices

Chapter 1. “Socio-Economic Status and Varied Freedoms in Eighteenth-Century Childhood Reading”

Elspeth Jajdelska

Chapter 2. “Enlightenment Reading Lists: Domestic Curricula and the Organisation of Knowledge in Novels by Women”

Rebecca Davies

Part II – Programs and Collections

Chapter 3. “Mediating the Archives: Child Readers and Their Books in Special Collections”

Suzan Alteri

Chapter 4. “Bookbug: The Mediating Effect of Book Gifting in Scotland”

Emma Davidson & Tracy Cooper

Part III - Textual and Material Strategies

Chapter 5. “Reading Information: Using Graphic Language to Enhance Engagement with Children’s Books”

Sue Walker

Chapter 6. “Mediating with Metafiction: Rethinking What Counts about Reading with Parents, Using Picturebooks”

Jennifer Farrar

Part IV – Texts, Worlds and Mediation

Chapter 7. “Mediating the Act of Reading through Picturebooks and Fictional Readers”

Evelyn Arizpe

Chapter 8. “ ‘My World Has Become Smaller’ – Cortically Remapping Postfeminist Confinement in Louise O’Neill’s Asking For It”

Fiona McCulloch