Potent Fictions: Children's Literacy and the Challenge of Popular Culture

Today's children spend more time than ever before watching television, playing computer games and reading comic and pulp fiction. Many of these are directly designed by the toy and media industry. Are children therefore simply being manipulated?

There is widespread concern that because of these kinds of popular fiction, children do not read `quality' literature, resulting in lower standards of literacy. There is also the further fear that because many of these popular media portray highly st...