Rereading Childhood Books: A Poetics by Alison Waller

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rereading Childhood Books: A Poetics by Alison Waller Margaret Mackey (bio) Rereading Childhood Books: A Poetics. By Alison Waller. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. The very first subheading in Rereading Childhood Books sums up one of the book's core priorities: "Paracanons and the lifelong reading act" (2). Waller is referencing Catherine Stimpson's 1990 definition of the paracanon as "a set of texts 'beloved' by individuals and communities of reading" (4). The idea of the lifelong reading act expands on Louise Rosenblatt's concept of the reading act, which embraces a particular reader at a particular time and in the context of a particular community. Waller's concept of the lifelong reading act incorporates remembering and rereading as well as forgetting and misremembering. She suggests that these activities "are not distinct from the reading act, but represent integrated elements that function on a micro level in each tangible, phenomenological encounter with a text, and on a macro level every time that text is conjured up through conscious reminiscence, involuntary memory, rereading projects or shared discourses about childhood books" (5). Whereas the academic study of children's literature places the adult critic and the child reader in separate relationships with the text, Waller argues that an adult reader who returns to a childhood book to re-engage with the experience of reading it is in an intermediate territory where distinctions are not so clear cut. As part of the project that informs this fascinating book, Waller invited 119 readers from eighteen to over eighty (skewing elderly: sixty-five of them are older than sixty, and only eleven are under thirty) to participate in a survey, providing data about childhood reading habits and histories, including specific titles and adult rereading. Forty-five of these participants agreed to take part in follow-up work. In the first phase, they provided as much information as they could about a significant childhood book, and what they remembered about their initial encounter with this book. They then reread the book and kept an account of this rereading, making observations about this reading event as well as what it conjured up in their minds about previous readings. Finally, they reflected on the experience in terms of the differences between remembering and rereading. Waller describes this approach as "autotopographical," arguing that "Reading histories are complex sites of meaning. Autotopography works to map a conceptual terrain that encompasses real and fictional geographies involved in adult memories of childhood books and their relationships with them, at the same time encouraging the reader [End Page 449] and critic to excavate meaning over the course of the life span" (61). The accounts provided by a small number of these individual readers, which appear throughout this book, are both fascinating in their own right and productive of stimulating thought on the idea of reading as a lifelong act. Overall, Rereading Childhood Books offers a rich and sophisticated account of the many ways in which our reading lives are woven into our regular daily existence, not just at any particular moment but over a reading lifetime. My one quarrel with this book is that it offers a fairly thin account of the methodologies used to map these autotopographies. The relatively detailed report that I provided in the previous paragraph was actually assembled from two sources: a terse account on page 11 of Rereading and Waller's 2017 chapter in The Edinburgh Companion to Children's Literature on "re-memorying" as a new phenomenological methodology in children's literature studies. The list of participants supplied in an appendix includes four items of information (two of them heavily overlapping): an estimate of age (eighty-plus, forty-plus, etc.), decade of birth (1920s, etc.), gender, and occupation. There is no indication to mark out the forty-five who volunteered for the second part of the exercise, nor is there any information about the titles that they chose to re-explore (except where this is given in the body of the text as part of the very illuminating discussion that surrounds the provided examples). This book offers a poetics, not a social science document, but it would not have taken much space or effort to enhance...