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New Directions in Picturebook Research. Edited by Teresa Colomer, Bettina Kümmerling- Meibauer, and Cecilia Silva-Díaz. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Reviewed by Jane M. Gangi
In their introduction, the editors set the focus of this book as the exploration of the cognitive and aesthetic aspects of picture book research. The chapters are based on papers first given at a conference with the same theme held in Barcelona in 2007. During a time of standardization in education-especially in the United States, where forty-four states have adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), which rely solely on the "close reading" of the New Criticism literary movement of the 1920s-this volume is a welcome reminder that there are multiple approaches to reading and viewing books. Of particular note is that throughout the book, authors ground their work in multimodality, reception, and reader response, which foster aesthetic transactions, in contrast to information processing models that limit children's participation.
The book is organized into three parts: in part one, "Picturebooks, Literacy, and Cultural Context," Perry Nodelman analyzes how Nan Gregory's Amber Waiting empowers children, offering them knowledge adults often try to suppress; Maria Nikolajeva synthesizes Roland Barthes's semiotic work to undergird the study of children's picture books; and Teresa Colomer analyzes changes in public and private spaces in picture books over time, from the bedroom and schoolyard to more active-though sometimes sentimental-participation in the world. Nina Christensen provides a historical context, contrasting expectations of the child reader in eighteenth- and twenty-first-century picture books. Sandra Beckett expands on historical contexts, demonstrating the ways contemporary illustrators allude to artists who preceded them out of homage-or, perhaps, as Beckett suggests, revenge. Whatever the reasons, Beckett makes an important point: All artists stand on the shoulders of others, and to allude is not to slack; Shakespeare, as it has often been pointed out, did not invent...