The Embedded and Embodied Literacies of a Young Reader

This article argues that if we paid attention to the local situation of a reader the way we attend to the life story of an author, we might gain a very different understanding of children’s literacy. It explores the literate approaches of a single child exploring a single theme—the settler culture as represented in a variety of materials accessible to her in the 1950s—across the discourses of television cowboy shows, school and recreational texts featuring settlers and indigenous people, and a British children’s novel about claiming the land. The article suggests that this kind of miscellaneous intertextuality is a larger feature of early reading than we sometimes assume.