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The visual representation of conceptual metaphors is perhaps the key semiotic resource that illustrators draw upon to convey both simple and complex meanings in children's picturebooks. Yet, aside from a few essays such as Marie Luise Rau's "Metaphors in Picturebooks from 0 to 3" (2011) and Joanne Purcell's "'Seeing the Light': A Cognitive Approach to the Metaphorical in Picture Books" (2018), there has been relatively little specific attention given to how visual conceptual metaphors work and how young readers understand and process them. Perhaps such analytic neglect stems from the fact that for adult readers such metaphors can be "quite lucid, hardly needing an especially keen eye" (Nikolajeva and Scott 211), the implication being that the representations are somehow natural and/or obvious.
In this essay, I will argue that there is a strong rationale for the analytical scrutiny of visual conceptual metaphors that appear in children's picturebooks, as these images form and inform the unconscious substrate, or what cognitive theorists call the schemas, that we use to process everyday experience. In fact, their very lucidity belies their constructed nature, creating a sense of obviousness that may have extended consequences for children's developing understanding of gender and race in certain cultural contexts. Because I want to consider these potential consequences in light of their implications for social justice, I will focus my attention on visual representations of gender schemas, as well as images that metaphorically link light with understanding, knowledge, and safety, and darkness with fear, loneliness, and irrationality, exploring how these conceptual metaphors are represented, reinforced, and challenged in several picturebooks. Finally, while I know that children's books play but a small role in children's developing understanding of the cultural worlds that they inhabit, I will explore how schema criticism may open a new front in the war against forms of social injustice that are perpetuated, at least in part, through the unconscious reinscription of damaging yet pervasive cognitive schemas.
Children and the Development of Metaphoric Understanding
Even as everyone from Web designers to illustrators to picturebook critics argues that visual literacy entails cultural skills that must be learned, most models still tend to leapfrog over the cognitive and affective processing involved in determining, for instance, that certain colors indicate or are culturally indexed...