Rereading childhood books : a poetics Introduction : excavating The reading scene The life space Affective traces Rereading attitudes Transforming misremembering forgetting Conclusion : the lifelong reading act. Childhood books play a special role in reading histories providing touchstones for our future tastes and giving shape to our ongoing identities. Bringing the latest work in Memory Studies to bear on writers memoirs autobiographical accounts of reading and interviews with readers Rereading Childhood Books explores how adults remember revisit and sometimes forget these significant books. Asking what it means to return to familiar works by well known authors such as Lewis Carroll C. S. Lewis and Enid Blyton as well as popular and ephemeral material not often considered as part of the canon Alison Waller develops a poetics of rereading and presents a new model for understanding lifelong reading. As such she reconceives the history of childrens literature through the shared and individual experiences of the readers who carry these books with them throughout their lives.