Rereading Childhood Books: A Poetics

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2019 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title and 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 childrens literature through the shared and individual experiences of the readers who carry these books with them throughout their lives.

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Rereading Childhood Books offers a rich and sophisticated account of the many ways in which our reading lives are woven into our regular daily existence, not just at any particular moment but over a reading lifetime[Wallers] evocation of the reading scene, the life space, and the affective traces that allow a childhood book to resonate throughout a lifetime is potent and persuasive. Her argument that children's literature (using the term broadly to include that paracanon as well as the masterpieces) may resonate throughout a lifespan, through both memory and re-engagement in multiple readings, is highly significant and demonstrates the intellectual value of talking with readers as well as engaging with the textsThis is a volume that I am very glad to add to my shelf. * Professor Margaret Mackey, University of Alberta, Canada in Childrens Literature Association Quarterly *
Wallers is an open-ended exploration, a qualitative dipping of toes into a vast, virtually unmapped, and elusive territory. Benjamins depiction of memory work as a cautious probing of spade in dark loam [] is an apt description of Wallers own highly commendable undertaking. She tackles the subject through well-informed discussion of underlying concepts illuminated by teasing glimpses of personal memory. * Gillian Lathey, International Research in Children's Literature 2020 13:2, 350-353 *
In this fascinating study, Waller examines memory, emotional attachment (both positive and negative) to books, and lifelong learning through the lens of rereading favorite childhood books in adulthood A must-read for any bibliophile or educator, this is a delightful examination of the ramifications of rereading. Summing Up: Essential. * CHOICE *
[Waller] tackles the subject through well-informed discussion of underlying concepts illuminated by teasing glimpses of personal memory. * International Research in Children's Literature *

Author Bio

Alison Waller is Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton, UK. She is the author of Constructions of Adolescence in Fantastic Realism (2009).