Reading children’s literature

This article covers the contribution reading and stories (children’s literature) have made to reading, its study, its material world, and the implications for teaching and learning to read -particularly with picturebooks – at the heart of that practice. It first explores the category of children’s literature as a possible ‘lie’, but also its special contributions: animal story or fable as a ‘creativity and criticality genre’ par excellence, attracting artists and writers of extraordinary talent, frequently breaking boundaries, and unashamedly taking partisan positions on matters of identity formation and socio-political justice. Distinctive experiments in crosswriting and originality are cited, and the material poetics, or ‘thingness’ of books, from the constructivist tradition onwards, as one of children’s literature’s leading innovations. The article then engages with the role children’s literature has played in the ‘reading wars’, including teaching strategies and governmental policies for learning to read; the controversies and competitive tensions inherent in the metrics and mechanisms of reading ‘for the test’ or for pleasure. After decades of reader-response theory emphasising the active roles of the reader and the text, the piece concludes with a plea to re-describe reading for new, screen-based, visual literacies offering linear, radial, spatial forms of reading, or reader-as-player.