Readers assume that commonplace properties of the real world also hold in realistic fiction. They believe, for example, that the usual physical laws continue to apply. But controversy exists in theories of fiction about whether real "individuals" exist in the story's world. Does Queen Victoria exist in the world of "Jane Eyre,"…

This article explores the potential for engaging 7 and 8-year-old school pupils in performative literature interpretation through process drama. Inspired by new materialism and affect theory, we focus on how literature interpretations come into being in dramatic fiction, and on how these becoming interpretations merge with the classroom. The study…

Autistic learners master visual and spatial abilities; they use visual language to organise, understand and give meaning to the world. Although they might struggle with verbal skills, they have an associative way of thinking. Taking into consideration the characteristics of seven autistic pupils, the aim of this paper was to identify the potential…

Play in the school setting is a highly contested issue in today's restrictive academic environment. Although many early childhood educators advocate the use of play in their classrooms and emphasize the importance of play for children's learning and development, children beyond the preschool and kindergarten years are not often afforded…

What is the hold of literature on a reader's imagination, on my imagination? I remember many hours spent with books in a kind of romantic entanglement, and heartful obsession, and joyful reverie. I certainly remember being lost with words, lost in enthusiastic abandonment. I loved the sounds of words, and the images they conjured, and the…

In this qualitative study, the author explores how young readers build literary understanding through performative responses in picturebook read-alouds. Performative responses allow children to create and express meaning in ways that go beyond talk and that engage their creativity and imagination. They include a variety of modalities, such as…

This article explores how reading strategy instruction that targets children's literature can unwittingly interfere with the development of a reading life. It compares the use of story-based children's literature for reading strategy instruction with the "untaught" story. It asks: What, if any, role does a read aloud that is unfettered by formal…

This article reports on a study of the responses of a second-grade class to the page breaks in contemporary picturebooks. In a picturebook, the text and accompanying illustrations are divided into a series of facing pages called openings, and the divisions between the openings are called page breaks or turns. Unlike a novel, in which the page…

In this article, the author argues that Emerson repudiated the formalism of nineteenth century belletristic, mechanistic, reason-centered, American rhetoric influenced by Hugh Blair. Instead Emerson promoted a rhetoric with imagination at its center, which calls for civic duty. (Contains 33 notes.)

While visiting the classroom of an English teacher on campus, the author noticed a large number of literature textbooks that were being replaced with a newer edition. In this article, she describes a project, which was inspired by these discarded literature textbooks, designed to introduce students to an art form based on ideas rather than…

Recent studies have shown that under the influence of feminist theory, today one of the most popular areas of academic children's literature criticism is "the rereading of texts for previously unrevealed interpretations" (Paul, 2004: 142). By "rereading," academic feminist children's literature critics look at the ways ideological implications are…

Close to 1,100 people attended the 55th Annual Meeting of the National Reading Conference at the Intercontinental Hotel in Miami, Florida from November 30-December 3, 2005. A record number of proposals were submitted this year (548), with 392 papers, symposia, and round tables accepted. This year's conference theme was inclusiveness and synthesis…