Results by title
235 books match the query 'Books and reading' and 6 start with d
Dear Charles Dickens, Love, South LA
Literature, Place, and BelongingJacqueline Jean Barrios
University of Iowa Press, 2026
Jacqueline Jean Barrios confronts the cultural challenges that big canonical books pose to new generations of readers. Instead of erasing the differences between Dickens’s implied audiences and his current ones, Barrios demonstrates how youth can serve as the visionaries who bridge the gap. By placing literature in everyday surroundings, students at any school and in any location can learn from the embodied and the poetic and even question the universalism that masks unexamined reverence for the Western canon.
Dependent States
The Child's Part in Nineteenth-Century American CultureKaren Sánchez-Eppler
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Dependent States examines the ties between children's literacy training and the growing cultural prestige of the novel; the way children functioned rhetorically in reform literature to enforce social norms; the way the risks of death to children shored up emotional power in the home; how Sunday schools socialized children into racial, religious, and national identities; and how class identity was produced, not only in terms of work, but also in the way children played. For Sánchez-Eppler, nineteenth-century childhoods were nothing less than vehicles for national reform. Dependent on adults for their care, children did not conform to the ideals of enfranchisement and agency that we usually associate with historical actors. Yet through meticulously researched examples, Sánchez-Eppler reveals that children participated in the making of social meaning. Her focus on childhood as a dependent state thus offers a rewarding corrective to our notions of autonomous individualism and a new perspective on American culture itself.
Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline
An Action Guide for LibrariesCarrie Scott Banks and Jill Anderson
American Library Association, 2026
The school-to-prison pipeline impacts communities across the country; often, this system and families impacted by it remain invisible. But librarians, educators, and others who work with youth know first-hand that libraries and reading can be life-altering for youth impacted by incarceration. Written by public librarians who have supported youth before, during, and after incarceration, this book draws from their own experiences while showcasing insights from other library workers, researchers, educators, people who work in the juvenile justice fields, and mental health professionals. Designed to empower libraries and their staff to provide children and teens with information, visibility, knowledge and skills, recreation, and role models, it shares practical strategies for helping youth avoid the school-to-prison pipeline or contend with it. Readers will discover
- a concise explanation of the school-to-prison pipeline, including statistics on how and why it disproportionately impacts LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and disabled youth;
- concrete, proven strategies for disrupting youth incarceration pathways by giving young people the tools and support they need to avoid incarceration;
- steps for bolstering youth engagement during out of school time;
- guidance on how to align disciplinary approaches with trauma-informed practices when dealing with rowdy youth and other disruptive behavior;
- an overview of what libraries are doing to provide programs and services inside a youth facility, including literacy support, high school equivalency/GED programs, and televisiting;
- strategies for combatting the isolation of children of incarcerated parents by creating inclusive and welcoming library environments;
- information about the complex and difficult process of reentry for incarcerated youth, with adaptable ideas and lessons from the work being done in libraries for reentering adults; and
- an inspiring vision, extrapolating from work in adjacent fields, of what libraries can do to overcome barriers to bringing more youth into the library.
Distant Reading
Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary PoetryPeter Middleton
University of Alabama Press, 2005
A dynamic account of the history, practice, and theory of poetry as performance.
Distant Reading considers poetry as performance, offers new insights into its popularity, and proposes a new history of its origins. It also explores related issues concerning the reception of poetry, the impact of the computer on how we read poetry, the persistence of the letter "I" in poems by avant-garde poets, the strangeness of the line-break as a demand on the reader's attention, and the idea of the reader as consumer. These themes are connected by a historically contextualized and theoretically sophisticated discussion of contemporary American and British poets continuing to work in the modernist tradition.
The introductory essay establishes a new methodology that transforms close reading into what Middleton calls "distant reading," interpretive reading that acknowledges the distances that texts travel from their point of composition to readers in other geographical and historical locations. It indicates that poetic innovation is often driven by a desire on the part of the poet to make this distance do cultural work in the meanings that the poem generates.
Ultimately, Distant Reading treats poetry as a cultural practice that is always situated within specific sites of performance—recited on stage, displayed in magazines, laid out on a page, scrolled on the computer screen—rather than as a transcendent cloud of meaning tethered only to its words.
Disturbing the Universe
Power and Repression in Adolescent LiteratureRoberta S. Trites
University of Iowa Press, 2004
The Young Adult novel is ordinarily characterized as a coming-of-age story, in which the narrative revolves around the individual growth and maturation of a character, but Roberta Trites expands this notion by chronicling the dynamics of power and repression that weave their way through YA books. Characters in these novels must learn to negotiate the levels of power that exist in the myriad social institutions within which they function, including family, church, government, and school.
Trites argues that the development of the genre over the past thirty years is an outgrowth of postmodernism, since YA novels are, by definition, texts that interrogate the social construction of individuals. Drawing on such nineteenth-century precursors as Little Women and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Disturbing the Universe demonstrates how important it is to employ poststructuralist methodologies in analyzing adolescent literature, both in critical studies and in the classroom. Among the twentieth-century authors discussed are Blume, Hamilton, Hinton, Le Guin, L'Engle, and Zindel.
Trites' work has applications for a broad range of readers, including scholars of children's literature and theorists of post-modernity as well as librarians and secondary-school teachers.
Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature by Roberta Seelinger Trites is the winner of the 2002 Children's Literature Association's Book Award. The award is given annually in order to promote and recognize outstanding contributions to children's literature, history, scholarship, and criticisim; it is one of the highest academic honors that can accrue to an author of children's literary criticism.
Dockside Reading
Hydrocolonialism and the Custom HouseIsabel Hofmeyr
Duke University Press, 2022