Our earliest explorations of books as material objects begin in childhood. As emerging readers, we learn the choreography of body and book, hand and eye: opening and closing; touching, turning and interacting with pages; tracing the relationships between word and image. This course traces the history and development of children’s and adolescent/young adult (YA) literature from the eighteenth century to the present, with a focus on the material object of the book in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. Through hands-on engagement with key primary texts, combined with critical theorisations of children’s and adolescent/YA literature, the material text and the history of reading, students will analyse the relationship between physical format and reading practices and gain a good understanding of the significance of children’s/YA books as objects that are cultural and physical, as well as textual.
- Lehrende/r: Sarah Pyke