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