A Short History of Reading Childhoods: Towards a Typology of Representation Reading Practices in Children’s Magazines (1921-1938)

Abstract

This article synthesizes a set of ideal perspectives on the reading practices dramatized in a selected corpus of child-oriented magazines published between 1921 and 1938 in Santiago, Chile, and Bogotá, Colombia. Th e analysis is structured around the following research questions: Who are the actual readers of child-oriented magazines during the aforementioned timespan? What do they read for? What reading practices are the most persistent in the texts selected for this paper? Answers were systematized by means of the construction of a typology as an analytic hypothesis on the representation of reading childhoods in this type of publications. The main conclusions of the study allow the creation of useful categories to address the analysis of the practices and reading programs along the history of reading aimed at children during the 20th century as a way of defining ideal conceptions of reading and readers. Th is allows identifying similarities between a) the effects of reading on the readers, b) the affective relations between readers, texts, text-mediators and, c) the functions of reading and printed publications aimed at children.