The interdisciplinary and methodologically varied approaches in this timely collection explore and seek to theorize various ways Anglophone childhood reading is mediated through programmatic interventions, textual features, and the web of adult/reader/text interactions. These engaging essays will inspire researchers in children’s literature and cultural studies to view reading practices with greater depth and nuance.

Karen Coats, University of Cambridge

This is a wonderfully wide-ranging set of essays exploring how children’s reading experiences have been shaped, across three centuries, by changing pedagogies and understandings of childhood, by social policy and publishers’ strategies, and by the institutions and individuals that provide children’s access to books. Ranging from the eighteenth century to the present, these essays challenge us, in whichever disciplines we work, to develop new methods of understanding children’s reading practices, and always to question our assumptions about how different children read, and what effects their reading can have.

Matthew Grenby, professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Newcastle University