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The big shoes of Little Bear : the publication history, emergence, and literary potential of the easy reader

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

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/2727
Date05 1900
CreatorsOzirny, Shannon
PublisherUniversity of British Columbia
Source SetsUniversity of British Columbia
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeText, Thesis/Dissertation
Format1946501 bytes, application/pdf
RightsAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

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