Rereading Childhood Books

Download or read book Rereading Childhood Books written by Alison Waller and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the ESSE book awards 2020, for Literatures in the English Language Childhood books play a special role in reading histories, providing touchstones for our future tastes and giving shape to our ongoing identities. Bringing the latest work in Memory Studies to bear on writers' memoirs, autobiographical accounts of reading, and interviews with readers, Rereading Childhood Books explores how adults remember, revisit, and sometimes forget, these significant books. Asking what it means to return to familiar works by well-known authors such as Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis and Enid Blyton, as well as popular and ephemeral material not often considered as part of the canon, Alison Waller develops a poetics of rereading and presents a new model for understanding lifelong reading. As such she reconceives the history of children's literature through the shared and individual experiences of the readers who carry these books with them throughout their lives.