A Literature of Questions : Nonfiction for the Critical Child

In A Literature of Questions, Joe Sutliff Sanders offers an innovative approach to children's nonfiction that goes beyond an assessment of a work's veracity to develop a book's equivocation as a basis for interpretation. Addressing how such writing is either vulnerable or resistant to critical engagement, Sanders pays attention to the attributes that nonfiction shares with other forms of literature, including voice and character, as well as special features of the genre, such as peritexts and photography. The first book to theorize children's nonfiction from a literary perspective, Sanders reveals how nonfiction can make young readers active learners rather than passive recipients of information. Book jacket.