Monthly Archives: January 2016

This month we kicked off the new year in style, with the first Reading, Writing and Memory Research Seminar of 2016. Roehampton’s own Dr Alison Waller spoke on ‘Experiments in Rereading: Childist Criticism and Bibliomemoir’. You can listen to Alison’s talk below.

Alison is Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton and member of the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature (NCRCL). She has research interests in adolescence and young adult fiction, and her first book was Constructions of Adolescence in Fantastic Realism (Routledge: 2009). She has also written articles on Robert Cormier, JD Salinger, and Philip Pullman, edited the New Casebook on Melvin Burgess (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and recently co-edited a special issue on Margaret Mahy for The Lion and the Unicorn (2015). She was involved in organising the AHRC-funded Memory Network project at Roehampton and is on the advisory board for the Memories of Fiction project. She is currently writing a monograph called The Poetics of Rereading Childhood Books, which investigates adult memories of early reading.

‘When Hugh Crago mused in an article in Signal in 1979 ‘whether it could be useful if I, and some others, were to set down what we do recall about our reading habits in childhood’ he was a relatively lone voice representing an interest in autobibliography in the field of children’s literature. In the years following, autobibliography – or bibliomemoir – has become an increasingly visible and valid methodology for exploring questions about childhood reading, with critics and popular writers examining their own youthful reading histories from a variety of perspectives and for multiple purposes. In this paper, I focus particularly on the practice of rereading in autobibliographical criticism and in the boom of contemporary bibliomemoirs, exploring what adult voices can tell us about early reading experiences by reflecting on childhood books they have returned to later in life. This alternative ‘childist criticism’ raises new issues and reflects a range of assumptions about children and their personal reading, and in this paper I will set out some of the patterns of ‘compliance’ and ‘resistance’ that can be observed in accounts of rereading such as Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built (2002), Rick Gekoski’s Outside of a Dog (2009), and Patricia Meyer Spacks’ On Rereading (2011).’