In this book, Johnston and Mangat consider ways in which particular postcolonial and multicultural literary texts are able to provide a space of cultural mediation for readers from various backgrounds. The studies described in the five chapters of the book explore the spaces of convergence of identity, culture and literature with students and teachers in high school contexts and undergraduates in university settings. In each study, readers are responding to texts that are culturally distant from their own literary and experiential histories. An objective of each study was to consider the nature of the cultural locations of the reader and the text, and the interstitial spaces between these locations. The book interrogates readers’ attempts to negotiate cultural difference in literary contexts and questions how this negotiation requires reading practices traditionally ignored in North American classrooms. The book will offer educators at the secondary and post-secondary levels rich material to draw upon for a rethinking of the school curriculum and will be of interest to scholars of postcolonial and literary studies.

This collection of essays explores the cultural significance of children’s reading by analyzing a series of Anglo-American case studies from the eighteenth century to the present. Marked by historical continuity and technological change, children’s reading proves to be a phenomenon with broad influence, one that shapes both the development of individual readers and wider social values. The essays in this volume capture such complexity by invoking the conception of “mediation” to approach children’s reading as a site of interaction among individual people, material texts, and institutional networks. Featuring a range of scholarly perspectives from the disciplines of literature, education, graphic design, and library and information science, this collection uncovers both the intricacies and wider stakes of children’s reading. The books, public programs, and archives that focus explicitly on children’s interests and needs are powerful arenas that give expression to the key ideological investments of a culture.

What is the value of picture books in educating a diverse society? This collection of original essays explores how preservice teachers from faculties of education across Canada engage with issues of diversity and national identity as represented in children’s picture books. Based on research drawn from education courses and student teaching experiences, the book illustrates new and culturally relevant approaches to curricula that meet the needs of increasingly diverse student bodies. The volume focuses on picture books as a central body of texts, drawing on recent reading theory and exploring the implications of bringing the works into school classrooms. Together, the essays offer a unique cross-Canada perspective on how picture books can help students and teachers explore identities, uncover personal and national histories, and locate a sense of place.

Through an innovative approach of critical ethnography and literacy research via case-study methodologies, Enacting Adolescent Literacies across Communities: Latino/a Scribes and Their Rites analyzes Latino/a adolescents’ engagement with the elements of literacy for English language arts learning and understanding. How young people enact literacies in their bicultural lives and understand literary traditions today reveals their own interests in democracy, equity, and opportunity. Moreover, the rites they perform often recover buried histories, mirrors, and stories similar to the pre-Columbian scribes whose intellectual legacy is relevant in the twenty-first century. R. Joseph Rodríguez illustrates how adolescents experience scribal identities and language pluralism that sustains their cultural knowledge as they make meaning and enact literacies with diverse audiences in civic and schooling communities.

Lim traces the complexities in construction and implementation of a school subject, namely Literature in English in Malaysia through a focused and grounded narrative where tensions regarding identity, reader response and conceptualisations about literature play out in a postcolonial context. The book demonstrates the need to think about school subjects as abstract concepts negotiated at various levels, be it during curriculum construction or in the classroom. These conceptualisations of the subject are further influenced by contemporary concerns and sociopolitical changes over time. As such, the scope of this book ranges from pre-independence Malaysia (then Malaya) from the 1950s till the current phase of the subject’s development in the 21st century. The volume illustrates the complex interplay of historical, cultural, and social influences on the conceptualisation of English literature as a school subject in Malaysia. Lim traces, examines, and interprets its development as an elective subject in the context of post-secondary Malaysian education, and engages with current trends in education such as internationalization and standardized assessment. Lim also highlights the importance of teacher and student lived experiences to argue that personal conceptualisations of the school subject are actualized and negotiated in classroom discourse. Offering unique insights into studying Literature in English in a postcolonial context, the book will appeal to researchers, students and practitioners in the fields of history of education, curriculum reform and literature education.

The teaching of texts in translation has become an increasingly common practice, but so too has the teaching of texts from languages and cultures with which the instructor may have little or no familiarity. The authors in this volume present a variety of pedagogical approaches to promote translation literacy and to address the distinct phenomenology of translated texts. The approaches set forward in this volume address the nature of the translator’s task and how texts travel across linguistic and cultural boundaries in translation, including how they are packaged for new audiences, with the aim of fostering critical reading practices that focus on translations as translations. The organizing principle of the book is the specific pedagogical contexts in which translated texts are being used, such as courses on a single work, survey courses on a single national literature or a single author, and courses on world literature. Examples are provided from the widest possible variety of world languages and literary traditions, as well as modes of writing (prose, poetry, drama, film, and religious and historical texts) with the aim that many of the pedagogical approaches and strategies can be easily adapted for use with other works and traditions. An introductory section by the editors, Brian James Baer and Michelle Woods, sets the theoretical stage for the volume. Written and edited by authorities in the field of literature and translation, this book is an essential manual for all instructors and lecturers in world and comparative literature and literary translation.

Sponsored by the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America, this volume features a selection of ten papers compiled from the Center's second national conference, accompanied by a detailed introduction. Presented by scholars from diverse backgrounds, the essays center on the emerging, interdisciplinary field of print culture. They examine children's literature and related print materials from a cultural perspective and discuss the influence of ideological, political, and material factors on the reader. Moreover, the authors join a cultural debate over the nature of childhood in specific historical periods.

This multidisciplinary handbook pulls together in one volume the research on children's and young adult literature which is currently scattered across three intersecting disciplines: education, English, and library and information science.

Postcolonial Naturalism proposes an innovative periodizing schema for historicizing contemporary Anglophone fiction. Engaging and revising the materialist paradigm of the Warwick Research Collective’s concept of “world-literature,” Fredric Jameson’s mapping of modernity’s cultural periods, and Christopher L. Hill’s positing of a transnational naturalism, Eric D. Smith theorizes “postcolonial naturalism” as a structurally determined cultural logic rather than as a literary technique or style. Supported by careful, theoretically and critically sophisticated analyses of exemplary literary works, this important intervention invites us to reconsider the living history of aesthetic naturalism as well as its social and political implications for the practice of world-literature in the aftermath of anticolonial resistance.

On what terms and concepts can we ground the comparative study of Anglophone literatures and cultures around the world today? What, if anything, unites the novels of Witi Ihimaera, the speculative fiction of Nnedi Okorafor, the life-writings by Stuart Hall, and the emerging Anglophone Arab literature by writers like Omar Robert Hamilton? This volume explores the globality of Anglophone fiction both as a conceptual framing and as a literary imaginary. It highlights the diversity of lives and worlds represented in Anglophone writing, as well as the diverse imaginations of transnational connections articulated in it. Featuring a variety of internationally renowned scholars, this book thinks through Anglophone literature not as a problematic legacy of colonial rule or as exoticizing commodity in a global literary marketplace but examines it as an inherently transcultural literary medium. Contributors provide new insights into how it facilitates the articulation of divergent experiences of modernity and the critique of hierarchies and inequalities within, among, and beyond post-colonial societies.