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Picturebooks: Beyond the Borders of Art, Narrative and Culture, edited by Evelyn Arizpe, Maureen Farrell, and Julie McAdam. London: Routledge, 2013.
Reading Visual Narratives: Image Analysis of Children's Picture Books, by Clare Painter, J. R. Martin, and Len Unsworth. Sheffield, UK: Equinox Publishing, 2013.
Picture books-books intended for young children which communicate information or tell stories through a series of many pictures combined with relatively slight texts or no texts at all-are unlike any other form of verbal or visual art. Both the pictures and the texts in these books are different from and communicate differently from pictures and texts in other circumstances. (Nodelman vii)
With this assertion in his 1988 publication of Words about Pictures, Perry Nodelman began the first and in many respects still standard work of literary criticism aimed at the picture book as a distinctive art form. By that time, the study of children's literature as something other and more than an educational tool of dubious literary and cultural interest and value had enjoyed just over a decade and a half of institutional recognition (measured by the creation of the Children's Literature Association and the launch of its journal in 1973). However, there was as yet no analytical framework for considering how picture books actually do their communicative work. The available tools for considering images were based on the aesthetics of gallery art, not the complex and varied interactions of words and pictures deployed in the process of storytelling. Nodelman's work broke new ground in teaching us how to see the various elements of picture book art and design, and opened a dialogue that has grown in critical sophistication and scope in tandem with the form itself.
Since the appearance of Nodelman's book, the criticism of picture books has both deepened with respect to explorations of what constitutes a picture book-including the very terminology we use to designate the form and its features-and broadened to include insights and critical apparatus adapted from other areas of inquiry, such as cultural geography, cognitive studies, visual literacy, philosophy, and semiotics. This review looks at two books that represent the exciting and dynamic state of the evolving critical dialogue of picture book research. The first, Picturebooks: Beyond the Borders of Art, Narrative and Culture, is...