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The Emergent Reader’s Working Kit of Stereotypes

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Abstract

This article draws on a careful study of series fiction read in the 1950s to explore how stereotypes feature in the development of a young reader’s competence in learning to process stories in print. Five categories of stereotype are teased out: embodied stereotypes, understood through physical experience; working stereotypes, discerned through reading and then put to use over and over again in successive textual encounters; recurring stereotypes that appear in one book after another; transient stereotypes that are simply never remembered; and subliminal stereotypes that linger unvisited in the mind.

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Correspondence to Margaret Mackey.

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Margaret Mackey is a Professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta. Her most recent book is Narrative Pleasures in Young Adult Novels, Films, and Video Games (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Her current research is an “auto-bibliography,” an extensive study of the materials across all media with which she became literate herself in the 1950s in Newfoundland. She served as North American Editor-in-Chief of Children’s Literature in Education from 1996 to 2007, and again briefly in 2011.

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Mackey, M. The Emergent Reader’s Working Kit of Stereotypes. Child Lit Educ 44, 87–103 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-012-9184-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-012-9184-1

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