"Speicher not only revives an understudied literary tradition, but also illuminates a new way to value common school narratives and offers a new archive of materials for historians. Schooling Readers engages with concerns important to both literary studies and history of education, as Speicher considers what we can learn from these texts, how these texts are shaped by their contextual moments, and how these texts speak back to and impact broader cultural conversations. Speicher’s study offers compelling and necessary insights into the early experiments of common school reform as we, in the twenty-first century, continue to negotiate the meanings, purposes, and roles of schooling."
—The Lion and the Unicorn
"Speicher outlines and provides examples of four basic plots that recur in the narratives: exhibitions and spelling bees to prove competence, school violence with corporal punishment and older boys’ resistance, male teachers falling in love with and marrying their female students, and teachers assuming parental roles (usually female teachers as mother figures). Speicher emphasizes the fact that authors hoped not only to entertain their readers but also to promote longer school sessions; better quarters, books, and equipment; and teacher training. She also points out that 19th-century readers saw these situations far differently than do 21st-century readers. The book covers new ground, is well written, and maintains the reader’s interest. Summing Up: Recommended."
—CHOICE
"Speicher’s study brings attention to an often overlooked area of literature and its role in school reform. Those interested in nineteenth-century American fiction, particularly its depictions of school life, will find an important contribution to the field, one that crosses disciplinary lines to make a credible and refined argument about literature, school reform, and attitudes toward class, gender, and race."
—The Journal of American Culture
“Schooling Readers will fascinate literary critics as well as historians of education. Speicher has performed a great scholarly service in assembling and providing as an appendix an ample bibliography of common school narratives; this will facilitate future research in this compelling area of study, as will the nature of the book’s chapter topics.”
—Patricia Roylance, author of Eclipse of Empires: World History in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture
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“Schooling Readers is an important contribution to our understanding of how literature not only informed the arguments concerning education for a democracy but also how it functioned as an instrument of education.”
—Mary Louise Kete, author of Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth Century America and coauthor of the Women’s Worlds: The McGraw-Hill Anthology of Women's Writing
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