Using examples of The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter to explore the impact of new media and technologies on how children learn about stories and reading, this book investigates nearly 100 re-tellings in a variety of media, some authorized by Potter's publisher Frederick Warne, some unauthorized. It looks at the implications of converging developments in children's literature:
*new media and technologies now readily available to children leading to new conventions and protocols of storytelling
*changing commercial pressures on publishers and an emphasis on producing commodities associated with books and videos
*saturation marketing which targets children and adults in different ways
*and a cultural emphasis on the fragmentation, adaptation, and re-working of texts.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit is now available as picture book, chapter book, board and bath book, pop-up, video (in versions that adhere to the original story and versions that deviate radically to include "new adventures" or Christan messages), ballet, CD-Rom, computer disc, audio tape and filmstrip.
The character of Peter Rabbit may be purchased as toy, clothing, dish, ornament, wallpaper, food, paper doll, and much else. His story and that of his author, Beatrix Potter, reappear in fragmented form in other books for children, in a murder mystery for adults and in a graphic novel for teenagers. This book raises questions about the impact of these developments on young readers.

eBook available with sample pages: HB:0815330944

The contemporary young reader learns from a very early age to read and interpret through a broad range of media. Literacies Across Media explores how a group of boys and girls, aged from ten to fourteen, make sense of narratives in a variety of formats, including print, electronic book, video, DVD, computer game and CD-ROM. This book records these young people over a period of eighteen months as they read, view and play different texts, demonstrating variations and consistencies of interpretative behaviour across different media.
Margaret Mackey analyses how the activities of reading, viewing and playing intertwine and affect each other's development. Her in-depth research shows young readers developing strategies for interpreting narratives through encounters with a diverse range of texts and media. The study breaks new ground in its illustration and exploration of the impact of cross-media fertilisation on how young readers come to an understanding of how to make sense of stories.

Literacies Across Media offers both a vivid account of a group of young readers coming to terms with texts and a radical perspective on the growth of a generation of young readers. It is thought-provoking, fascinating and highly informative reading not only for theoreticians interested in the reading process, but also teachers, librarians, parents and anybody involved with young people and their texts.

The contemporary young reader learns from a very early age to read and interpret through a broad range of media. Literacies Across Media explores how a group of boys and girls, aged from ten to fourteen, make sense of narratives in a variety of formats, including print, electronic book, video, DVD, computer game and CD-ROM. This book records these young people over a period of eighteen months as they read, view and play different texts, demonstrating variations and consistencies of interpretative behaviour across different media.
Margaret Mackey analyses how the activities of reading, viewing and playing intertwine and affect each other's development. Her in-depth research shows young readers developing strategies for interpreting narratives through encounters with a diverse range of texts and media. The study breaks new ground in its illustration and exploration of the impact of cross-media fertilisation on how young readers come to an understanding of how to make sense of stories.

Literacies Across Media offers both a vivid account of a group of young readers coming to terms with texts and a radical perspective on the growth of a generation of young readers. It is thought-provoking, fascinating and highly informative reading not only for theoreticians interested in the reading process, but also teachers, librarians, parents and anybody involved with young people and their texts.

Using examples of The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter to explore the impact of new media and technologies on how children learn about stories and reading, this book investigates nearly 100 re-tellings in a variety of media, some authorized by Potter's publisher Frederick Warne, some unauthorized. It looks at the implications of converging developments in children's literature:
*new media and technologies now readily available to children leading to new conventions and protocols of storytelling
*changing commercial pressures on publishers and an emphasis on producing commodities associated with books and videos
*saturation marketing which targets children and adults in different ways
*and a cultural emphasis on the fragmentation, adaptation, and re-working of texts.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit is now available as picture book, chapter book, board and bath book, pop-up, video (in versions that adhere to the original story and versions that deviate radically to include "new adventures" or Christan messages), ballet, CD-Rom, computer disc, audio tape and filmstrip.
The character of Peter Rabbit may be purchased as toy, clothing, dish, ornament, wallpaper, food, paper doll, and much else. His story and that of his author, Beatrix Potter, reappear in fragmented form in other books for children, in a murder mystery for adults and in a graphic novel for teenagers. This book raises questions about the impact of these developments on young readers.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203305213

Thirteen essays explore the timeless appeal of Peter's antics, and the impact of this extraordinary book on children worldwide. Contributors, each a respected scholar in the field of children's literature, examine details of Potter's life, her history as an artist, her accomplishments as a naturalist, and the contextual factors affecting her writing and illustrations. Others investigate the timelessness of this story, exploring its psychological and sociological truths and comparing Peter Rabbit to present day literature.

"In all creative writing, the question of what is true and what is real are two very different considerations. Figuring out how to dance between them is a murky business." In Most of What Follows Is True, Michael Crummey examines the complex relationship between fact and fiction, between the "real world" and the stories we tell to explain it. Drawing on his own experience appropriating historical characters to fictional ends, he brings forward important questions about how writers use history and real-life figures to animate fictional stories. Is there a limit to the liberties a writer can take? Is there a point at which a fictionalized history becomes a false history? What responsibilities do writers have to their readers, and to the historical and cultural materials they exploit as sources? Crummey offers thoughtful, witty views on the deep and timely conversation around appropriation.

"The miracle of the preserved word, in whatever medium-print, audio text, video recording, digital exchange-means that it may transfer into new times and new places." -From the Introduction Margaret Mackey draws together memory, textual criticism, social analysis, and reading theory in an extraordinary act of self-study. In One Child Reading, she makes a singular contribution to our understanding of reading and literacy development. Seeking a deeper sense of what happens when we read, Mackey revisited the texts she read, viewed, listened to, and wrote as she became literate in the 1950s and 1960s in St. John's, Newfoundland. This tremendous sweep of reading included school texts, knitting patterns, musical scores, and games, as well as hundreds of books. The result is not a memoir, but rather a deftly theorized exploration of how a reader is constructed. One Child Reading is an essential book for librarians, classroom teachers, those involved in literacy development in both scholarly and practical ways, and all serious readers.

This open access book is a unique study of the impact of lived experience on literate life, exploring how children’s reading development is affected by their home setting, and how this sense of place influences textual interpretation of the books they read. Based on qualitative research and structured around interviews with twelve participants, Space, Place and Children's Reading Development focuses on the digital maps and artistic renderings these readers were asked to create of a place (real or imagined) that they felt reflected their literate youth, and the discussions that followed about these maps and their evolution as readers. Analysing the participant’s responses, Margaret Mackey looks at the rich insights offered about the impact on childhood stability after experiences such as migration; the "reading spaces" children make based on their social relationships and domestic spheres; the creation of "textual spaces" and the significance of the recurring motif of forests in the participants’ maps; the importance of the Harry Potter novels; the basis of life-long reading habits; psychological spaces and whether readers visualize when they read. Blending theoretical perspectives on reading from many disciplines with the personal experiences of readers of diverse nationalities, languages, disciplinary interests, and life experiences, this is an enlightening account of the behaviors of readers, reading histories, and place-based reader responses to literature. By building greater understanding about the broad and subtle processes that enable people to read, this study refines the kind of questions we ask about reading and moves towards developing a multidisciplinary language for the study and discussion of reading practices in contemporary times. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Featuring seven English-language essays, five French-language essays, and a bilingual introduction, this collection examines the cultural work of space and memory in Canada and Canadian literature, and encourages readers to investigate Canada within its regional, national, and global contexts. It also invites us to recognize local intersections so easily overlooked, yet so important. The diverse critical approaches of this collection reveal and probe the unities and fractures in national understanding, telling stories of otherness and marginality, of dis-location and un-belonging. This collection will be welcomed by readers and critics of Canadian literature. Contributors: Albert Braz, Samantha Cook, Jennifer Delisle, Lise Gaboury-Diallo, Smaro Kamboureli, Janne Korkka, Andre Lamontagne, Margaret Mackey, Sherry Simon, Pamela Sing, Camille van der Marel, Erin Wunker

This open access book is a unique study of the impact of lived experience on literate life, exploring how children's reading development is affected by their home setting, and how this sense of place influences textual interpretation of the books they read. Based on qualitative research and structured around interviews with twelve participants, Space, Place and Children's Reading Development focuses on the digital maps and artistic renderings these readers were asked to create of a place (real or imagined) that they felt reflected their literate youth, and the discussions that followed about these maps and their evolution as readers. Analysing the participant's responses, Margaret Mackey looks at the rich insights offered about the impact on childhood stability after experiences such as migration; the "reading spaces" children make based on their social relationships and domestic spheres; the creation of "textual spaces" and the significance of the recurring motif of forests in the participants' maps; the importance of the Harry Potter novels; the basis of life-long reading habits; psychological spaces and whether readers visualize when they read. Blending theoretical perspectives on reading from many disciplines with the personal experiences of readers of diverse nationalities, languages, disciplinary interests, and life experiences, this is an enlightening account of the behaviors of readers, reading histories, and place-based reader responses to literature. By building greater understanding about the broad and subtle processes that enable people to read, this study refines the kind of questions we ask about reading and moves towards developing a multidisciplinary language for the study and discussion of reading practices in contemporary times. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

The past century has witnessed an ever-accelerating revolution in the ways by which we communicate with each other, and that revolution is far from complete. Understanding how our literacy skills and behaviours are evolving-how we make use of old technologies and adapt to new ones-and how critical development may be fostered is arguably one of the greatest challenges of the twenty-first century. It is vital to education, to civic participation, to political and commercial judgement, and to many other areas of contemporary life. One of the principal barriers to gaining a comprehensive grasp of how people understand and use contemporary media lies in differential adoption of media technologies. This differential adoption, whether generational, financial, or geographic, has major implications for the development of literacies related to particular media. Official educational practices often lag far behind behaviours 'on the ground', and the ways in which learners develop new strategies for relating to media are as likely to be tacitly acquired through play as explicitly articulated in formal learning processes. It is essential, therefore, to pay careful attention to people's implicit assumptions about media use as well as to look at what is more explicitly understood. To help make sense of these complexities and the global explosion of interest and research in media and digital education, this four-volume collection, a new title in the Routledge Major Work series, Major Themes in Education, brings together the best research and theory on issues relating to literacies in both old- and new-media technologies. The volumes in the collection gather both canonical and the finest cutting-edge scholarship on media literacies, exploring media technologies from a variety of perspectives. As well as focusing on the theoretical questions and the practical educational issues arising out of the constantly changing nature of the technological revolution, Media Literacies also examines the behaviours of media users themselves, from their first tacit understandings of how to make sense of a new kind of text to their later articulated and critical responses. This attention to users is reflected in the organization of the volumes. The editor, a leading scholar in the field, has organized the collection under the 'verbs' of media behaviour: viewing, listening, game-playing, using the Internet, interacting with other people, information-seeking, and reading and writing in new times. The set also comprises a general introductory section and a final section exploring some of the engines that have driven media change (such as aesthetic developments, corporate priorities, political pressures, and a few select 'global accelerators' of change: sports, religion, and the movement of people across national boundaries). Media Literacies is an essential collection and is destined to be valued as a vital research resource by all scholars and students with an interest in the subject.