Despite incredible sales success, popularity, and a fifty year history, easy readers are one of the most neglected forms of children’s literature. Called everything from “the poor stepchild of the more glamorous picture book or children’s novel” to “literary flotsam,” easy readers are too-often regarded as insubstantial, superficial, sub-par literature. This thesis provides the first comprehensive, theoretically grounded examination of easy readers and endeavors to prove that a surprising complexity lurks beneath the easy reader’s decodable surface. In order to illuminate both extra-textual and textual complexity, easy readers are treated generically and examined using the contemporary genre theories of Amy Devitt and Adena Rosmarin. This thesis ultimately unearths a heretofore unexplored complexity in the easy reader’s publication history and generic emergence, and finds that the easy reader genre has literary potential and can accommodate works of artistic merit.

Despite incredible sales success, popularity, and a fifty year history, easy readers are one of the most neglected forms of children’s literature. Called everything from “the poor stepchild of the more glamorous picture book or children’s novel” to “literary flotsam,” easy readers are too-often regarded as insubstantial, superficial, sub-par literature. This thesis provides the first comprehensive, theoretically grounded examination of easy readers and endeavors to prove that a surprising complexity lurks beneath the easy reader’s decodable surface. In order to illuminate both extra-textual and textual complexity, easy readers are treated generically and examined using the contemporary genre theories of Amy Devitt and Adena Rosmarin. This thesis ultimately unearths a heretofore unexplored complexity in the easy reader’s publication history and generic emergence, and finds that the easy reader genre has literary potential and can accommodate works of artistic merit.

Despite incredible sales success, popularity, and a fifty year history, easy readers are one of the most neglected forms of children’s literature. Called everything from “the poor stepchild of the more glamorous picture book or children’s novel” to “literary flotsam,” easy readers are too-often regarded as insubstantial, superficial, sub-par literature. This thesis provides the first comprehensive, theoretically grounded examination of easy readers and endeavors to prove that a surprising complexity lurks beneath the easy reader’s decodable surface. In order to illuminate both extra-textual and textual complexity, easy readers are treated generically and examined using the contemporary genre theories of Amy Devitt and Adena Rosmarin. This thesis ultimately unearths a heretofore unexplored complexity in the easy reader’s publication history and generic emergence, and finds that the easy reader genre has literary potential and can accommodate works of artistic merit. / Arts, Faculty of / Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS), School of / Graduate

Syllabi are an integral part of any college experience and an understanding for how the genre functions on a rhetorical level is an under-researched area in the field of higher education. Using the tools of rhetorical analysis—looking at language and genre structures—I gathered a selection of 25 First-Year Writing syllabi within the Department of English at Virginia Tech to help address this concern of a lack of research. Using qualitative research methods—specifically those dealing with language and genre coding—I worked through my syllabi selection to ascertain how the genre functions rhetorically. Using Mary Louise Pratt's idea of the "contact zone" as well as Rhetorical Genre Theories and Actor-Network Theory, I argue that beginning with an understanding for how the genre of syllabi function rhetorically will also help us understand how the genre can be communicative, in the sense that it sends a message, as well as performative. / Master of Arts / Syllabi are an integral part of any college experience and an understanding for how the genre functions on a rhetorical level is an under-researched area in the field of higher education. Using the tools of rhetorical analysis—looking at language and genre structures—I gathered a selection of 25 First-Year Writing syllabi within the Department of English at Virginia Tech to help address this concern of a lack of research. Using qualitative research methods—specifically those dealing with language and genre coding—I worked through my syllabi selection to ascertain how the genre functions rhetorically. Using Mary Louise Pratt’s idea of the “contact zone” as well as Rhetorical Genre Theories and Actor-Network Theory, I argue that beginning with an understanding for how the genre of syllabi function rhetorically will also help us understand how the genre can be communicative, in the sense that it sends a message, as well as performative.