The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from the New England Primer to the Scarlet Letter

Rating:
Summary: J is for joyous
Review: This unusual,lively work of scholarship explains the changing use (and appearance) of the alphabet--in U.S. pedagogy and also in American fiction--between the late seventeenth century and today. The initial presentation of the alphabet to young readers, Crain argues, says much about American notions of pleasure and privacy on the one hand, morality and good citizenship on the other. Separate chapters first consider early American primers, hornbooks, and alphabet books, proceeding then to images of reading and letters in Susan Warner's best-selling novel _A Wide, Wide World_ and Nathaniel Hawthorne's _The Scarlet Letter_, which (Crain notes) is, among other things, the letter "A"'s most notorious appearance in classic American fiction. An epilogue extends the discussion to our own day, considering the guest appearance of alphabet-letters as "sponsors" on _Sesame Street_ as well as the use of letters in the contemporary paintings of Edward Ruscha. Equally valuable as a learned resource on early reading pedagogy in the U.S. and as an insightful and crucial contribution to cultural studies and literary criticism, _The Story of A_ is also beautifully designed--copiously illustrated with pictures of hornbooks, "cross-rows," and later images. The icons from the _New England Primer_, Crain points out, combine sober religious emblems with robustly secular images from tavern signs; while those from nineteenth-century alphabet books suggest by contrast a moralizing, middle-class takeover of the alphabet that still may permeate stuffy American attitudes about literacy. Few books this original are this solid, mature, and well-researched. _The Story of A_ offers a very useful synthesis of learned scholarship and sophisticated, theoretically informed interpretation. The book has changed my thinking about literacy and pedagogy, but not by polemics--simply by its definition of compelling American contexts (literary and social) that I had never noticed before. One final merit: this preserves in its energetic and lively style something of the exuberance of its variegated and colorful source-materials.