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Picturebooks: Representation and Narration edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer. New York: Routledge, 2014. 239 p. ISBN 9780415818018.
The goals of Routledge's Children's Literature and Culture series, as defined by its founder, Jack Zipes, are "to enhance research in this field and ... point to new directions that bring together the best scholarly work throughout the world." A recent publication in the series, Picturebooks: Representation and Narration, edited by Bettina Kümmerling- Meibauer, unequivocally meets these criteria. The twelve articles in this collection exemplify the outstanding achievements of some pioneers and most respected theorists in western Children's Literature scholarship of the past twenty-five years and articulate the "new directions" they are forging. Some revisit familiar picturebooks; others travel through new terrains; all open promising portals for future exploration.
The collection has three theoretical clusters. Part I, comprising five articles, focuses on "Crossing Genre Boundaries: Artists' Books, Wordless Picturebooks, and Picturebooks for Adults." "Boundaries" is interpreted variously for explorations of visual and verbal strategies shared by children's and adult's literature, text (however limited)-image synergies, and innovative deconstructions of a book. Included are articles by Åse Marie Ommundsen, who traces the origins of a "Nordic phenomenon," adult picturebooks, from increasingly advanced picturebooks for children, and Emma Bosch, who interrogates the term "wordless" picturebook by investigating texts and peritexts and developing a system of classification to avoid mislabelling. More beneficial is Sandra Beckett's advice to question "the need to categorize artists' books or books of any kind." Renowned for her work on "crossover" literature, Beckett produces a trailblazing discussion of...