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Reading Visual Narratives: Image Analysis of Children's Picture Books. By Clare Painter, J. R. Martin, and Len Unsworth. Sheffield, UK: Equinox, 2013.
Picturebooks: Beyond the Borders of Art, Narrative and Culture. Ed. by Evelyn Arizpe, Maureen Farrell, and Julie McAdam. New York: Routledge, 2013.
Reviewed by Paula T. Connolly
Reading Visual Narratives: Image Analysis of Children's Picture Books, a volume in Equinox's Functional Linguistics series, offers a study premised upon multimodal discourse analysis in order to explore the types and interactions of "different modalities within a multimodal text" (3). Painter, Martin, and Unsworth's work is situated within systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) to study central metafunctions of picture books, principally exploring ideational, interpersonal, and textual meaning.
While the first chapter introduces their theoretical framework, particularly how they use Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen's Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (1996, 2006) as a touchstone text, the next three chapters each focus on a specific metafunction, with the final chapter examining the "intermodality" of picture books. Chapter 2's study of "interpersonal metafunction" explores how images-through proximity, orientation, focalization, and ambience-elicit a sense of connection or distance with readers. The discussion of focalization, for example, includes a range of considerations, such as whether the reader is placed in a "contact" or "observe" position with a character, and, if in the former, whether one is engaged "directly" with a character's gaze or less directly "invited" into the scene. Additionally, one is asked to determine whether the role of reader is "mediated" or "unmediated," depending on the extent to which the reader enters the image through the viewpoint of a depicted character who may be "inscribed" and...