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The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture opens with former Children’s Literature Association Quarterly editor Katharine Capshaw Smith’s 2013 call for the field of children’s literature to attend to its underexamined areas of study; “consider the ‘early reader’ genre,” Capshaw Smith writes (qtd. in Miskec 1). Anyone who has taught a survey course in children’s literature will recognize this gap in the scholarship. For the picture books, graphic novels, periodicals, and novels we teach, there are authoritative histories and theoretical studies to include on course reading lists and to review in class preparation. Yet the books directed at new readers have received only scattershot attention from literary critics. For the student or scholar researching Elephant and Piggie, Captain Underpants, Ivy and Bean, and their ilk, there are only a few studies dedicated to specific Early Readers and none, until now, that address the genre as literature. This is the critical void Jennifer Miskec and Annette Wannamaker step in to fill with their valuable new collection of essays on Early Readers.
The central goal of Miskec and Wannamaker’s collection is to rescue Early Readers from their reputation as utilitarian and disposable works of “paraliterature,” and to argue, instead, that these works are significant as young readers’ “first opportunity to engage with a work of literature on their own, to feel a sense of mastery over a text, and ideally to experience pleasure from the act of beginning to read independently” (1, 1–2). To explain Early Readers’ reputation as merely functional texts, meant to be used and dismissed from the bookshelf, Miskec and Wannamaker’s introduction points to the genre’s close association with the practical goals of literacy instruction and the market glut of cheaply made, mass-produced paperbacks created to supply every stage of this learning process. To remedy these misunderstood books’ standing, Miskec and Wannamaker reframe the Early Reader as a genre with distinct origins, with unique aesthetic aims and conventions, and as cultural artifacts that initiate child readers into ideological systems and reflect cultural attitudes toward children at this specific developmental moment. The Early Reader’s location at the site of the new reader’s nascent independence from (some) adult mediation is crucial to the identity of the Early Reader this collection presents. Early Readers, Miskec and...