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In their introduction to The Early Reader in Children's Literature and Culture:Theorizing Books for Beginning Readers, Jennifer M. Miskec and Annette Wannamaker define the category of the Early Reader loosely as "those books that children are first able to read entirely on their own" (4). The authors point out that although "Early Readers are often overlooked, dismissed, or merely tolerated . . . as fun, silly fare a child can uncritically consume before moving, hopefully quickly, onto more meaningful, more literary texts," this category of books "deserve[s] much more scholarly attention and careful thought" (1). Whether termed "Early Readers," "Easy Readers," "beginning readers," "intermediate readers," "independent readers," "early chapter books,"or "first readers," this broad category of books, Miskec and Wannamaker argue, represents perhaps the first moment that many young readers have to independently engage with and experience pleasure from a work of literature. This collection sets out to answer Katharine Capshaw's call in the Spring 2013 issue of Children's Literature Association Quarterly that children's literature scholars focus critical attention on the early reader genre, and it does so by using interdisciplinary approaches from research in the fields of education, cultural studies, literary theory, and children's literature (1–2).
The Early Reader in Children's Literature and Culture includes fifteen chapters and an introduction and is divided into four sections: History, Aesthetics and Form, Culture, and Global Contexts. Overall, the chapters in Section I: History, along with the introduction, were the most noteworthy in defining and situating the development of the Early Reader genre within the history of children's literature. While the chapters in Section II: Aesthetics...