| Reading for Comfort: Children's Literature and the Problematic Pleasures of the Text explores a variety of children's texts--- Winnie-the-Pooh, the Town Mouse/Country Mouse tale and a number of "girls' books" from Betsy-Tacy to Little Women---in order to reveal the ways that such literature can potentially construct and represent comfort. For this purpose, I begin with a definition of the process I call "comfort reading," drawing on theories of pleasure and theories of the novel. I then pose the questions: "Why do particular audiences find certain texts or ways of reading so comforting?" and "In what ways might comfort be both generative and inhibitive?" I argue that while the experience of comfort is not exclusive to children and (ideas about) childhood, it nonetheless plays a substantial role in our understanding of children's literature, impacting our perceptions of other culturally constructed phenomena such as class, parental roles, domesticity, and gender. Although for the most part this study is methodologically a textual one, based upon my own assessment of texts, it also acknowledges that comfort reading is a symbiotic creation: part text, part author, and part reader. Ultimately, I hope that by coming to a clearer understanding of this creation we will take a more critical approach to children's texts and to our own reading practices---what we choose to read, what we choose to dismiss as trivial, what we choose to ignore, and why. |
