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Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Children's and Young Adult Literature
Returning To Childhood: Memoirs Of Childhood Reading, Stephanie Montalti
Returning To Childhood: Memoirs Of Childhood Reading, Stephanie Montalti
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This thesis analyzes Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built: A Life in Reading, Jane Sullivan’s Storytime: Growing up with Books, and Margaret Mackey’s One Child Reading: My Auto-Bibliography to investigate how memoirists recall events and reread stories from childhood. I argue that memoirs of childhood reading or bibliomemoirs temporarily fuse childhood and adulthood through the act of rereading, which produces emotional responses, and writing a memoir. By rereading childhood stories, memoirists identify with their child self and express feelings comparable to those they felt upon first reading. In bibliomemoirs, passive and active reading create what I describe as a …