The late novelist Walker Percy once argued that literature, especially fictional stories, has portrayed a clearer and far more cohesive picture of the human condition than any of the social sciences, including history. His ideas hint at the possibility of conceptualizing the American experience as the story that it is and as a way of organizing…

Examines the promotion of cultural diversity in the United States through childrens books. Discusses the scarcity of multicultural literature for children, ethnic folklore, racial bias in older books for children, new stereotypes in children's literature, political correctness, and ways to enhance access to quality multicultural literature. (AEF)

This preliminary report sets the Folktale project, an interdisciplinary cooperative effort involving literary criticism, linguistics, the craft of translation, psychology, and statistics, in the context of reading and reading research in the modern world, and discusses experimental reader response research in Denmark as well as in other countries.…

This report, the second of seven, part of an interdisciplinary project on the context of reading and reading research that explores similarities and dissimilarities in the response to literature in readers from different cultures, describes the way in which potentially useful texts, i.e. folktales, were selected by team members. The report first…

This report, the third of seven, part of an interdisciplinary project on the context of reading and reading research that explores similarities and dissimilarities in the response to literature in readers from different cultures, describes the empirical selection procedure used in order to identify the three tales which were to be used in future…

This paper, the fourth of seven, part of an interdisciplinary project on the context of reading and reading research that explores similarities and dissimilarities in the response to literature in readers from different cultures, describes the work on organizing texts from different cultures and nations (Denmark, Greenland, and Turkey) in the…

This paper, the fifth of seven, part of an interdisciplinary project on the context of reading and reading research that explores similarities and dissimilarities in the response to literature in readers from different cultures, describes the methods used for the construction of a questionnaire for readers' social, educational, financial, and…

This paper, the last of seven, part of an interdisciplinary project on the context of reading and reading research that explores similarities and dissimilarities in the response to literature in readers from different cultures, supplies the "Folktale project" with readers' statements which can be used for the construction of a…