Reviews 2009
Reader Development in Practice: Bringing literature to readers
Reader Development in Practice: Bringing literature to readers. Edited by Susan Hornby and Bob Glass. London: Facet Publishing, 2008. 224 pages. £44.95 (hardback).
Accounts by practitioners and academics of projects designed to promote reader development are always heartening, especially when they range as far and wide as those in the collection edited by Hornby and Glass. Initiatives in public libraries in the UK, for example, are as diverse as “Cracking the Code,” timed to coincide with the release of the Da Vinci Code film, or live music to attract local teenagers—a notion that will be anathema to some. The concept of reading as a social crusade that underpins much of this book includes reading groups for carers, the homeless, and a writer’s diary of his engagements with local communities. Later the editors turn their attention to fiction; Kay Sambell’s informative analysis of the development of futuristic fiction for young readers is the one essay devoted entirely to the discussion of children’s literature in Hornby and Glass’s book. Finally, the independent bookseller’s point of view on survival strategies, together with analyses of the function of hypertext and cybertext works and the progress and qualities of e-books, make this collection a thought-provoking and timely interrogation of the future of the book and of imaginative fiction for all ages.
Gillian Lathey
University of Surrey Roehampton, England
Stories, Pictures & Reality: Two children tell by Virgina Lowe. Review by Arundhati Deosthale.
Novi val nedolžnosti v otroški literaturi: kaj sporočata Harry Potter in Lyra Srebrousta? [A New Wave of Innocence in Children’s Literature: Conservative backlash and the significance of Harry Potter and Lyra Silvermouth] by Lilijana Burcar. Review by Neva Šlibar.
The Fantasy of Family: Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal by Elizabeth Thiel. Review by Björn Sundmark.
The Family in English Children’s Literature by Ann Alston. Review by Helma van Lierop-Debrauwer.
Twain, Alcott, and the Birth of the Adolescent Reform Novel by Roberta Seelinger Trites. Review by Roxanne Harde.
The Story and the Self. Children’s Literature: Some Psychoanalytic Perspectives edited by Jenny Plastow. Review by Anto Thomas.
Enterprising Youth: Social Values and Acculturation in Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature edited by Monika Elbert. Review by Sandra Burr.
Divided Worlds: Studies in Children’s Literature edited by Mary Shine Thompson and Valerie Coghlan. Review by Jane Suzanne Carroll.
Reader Development in Practice: Bringing literature to readers edited by Susan Hornby and Bob Glass. Review by Gillian Lathey.
A Victorian Quartet: Four Forgotten Women Writers by Liz Thiel, Elaine Lomax, Bridget Carrington and Mary Sebag-Montefiore. Review by Andrea Peterson.
Astrid Lindgren – Werk und Wirkung. Internationale und interkulturelle Aspekte. [Astrid Lindgren – Works and Effects. International and intercultural aspects] edited by Svenja Blume, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Angelika Nix. Review by Sara Van den Bossche.
Death, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Adolescent Literature by Kathryn James. Review by Lydia Kokkola.
Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth: Tales of Pullman, Lewis, Tolkien, MacDonald and Hoffmann by William Gray. Review by Lydia Kokkola.
Home Words: Discourses of Children’s Literature in Canada edited by Mavis Reimer. Review by Marek Oziewicz.
Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale edited by Stephen Benson. Review by Michelle Ryan-Sautour.
Owner of the means of instruction? Children’s Literature: some Marxist perspectives edited by Jenny Plastow. Review by Ulf Schöne.
Facets of Children’s Literature Research: Collected and Revised Writings by Göte Klingberg. Review by Björn Sundmark.
Barnlitteraturanalyser[Analyses of Children’s Literature] edited by Maria Andersson and Elina Druker. Review by B.J. Epstein.
