ABSTRACT
Cultural policy programmes, such as the Victorian state government in Australia’s recent ‘1000 Books Before School’ campaign, encourage caregivers of preschool children to familiarise them with books through reading aloud and generally creating positive associations with print, the better to prepare them for formal literacy education at school. The problem, from a methodological perspective, is that the act of reading is largely ephemeral and, as Darnton’s fellow book historian Roger Chartier noted, ‘only rarely leaves traces’. The text of a book may itself provide clues to its expected mode of consumption, such as occasional references to a listening audience in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales , or paratextual materials such as illustrations, prefaces or references that seek to engage certain kinds of readers. Actual readings are thus more richly diverse than credited by literary studies’ earlier idealised conceptions of the ‘Reader’. This diversity is inevitable because, as literary sociologist Andrew Milner summarises, at its base reading is ‘an irreparably social process’.
