The road from nationalism to individualism passes through aesthetics: changes in Israeli literature readers, 1950s-1990s

ABSTRACT Literary readers express the pedagogical and literary perspectives that dominate a given era. This article examines Israeli readers for Junior High students from the 1950s when Zionist ideals were prioritised, to the 1970s – when literary studies promoted aesthetic and formalistic methods, to the 1990s, when textbooks highlighted the subjective response of the young readers. These changes were manifested in the readers through the selection of texts as well as the editorial divisions into ideological and aesthetic categories. This article explores these transformations by discussing dominant readers while focusing on the artistic elements, genres, and literary forms.