A Variety of Literary and Artistic Styles: Contemporary Canadian Picture Books

Authors and artists of picture books have done imaginative work in a great variety of literary and artistic styles, reflecting tastes in both the fine arts and popular culture.¹ The potentiality of modern picture books for innovation has been stressed in the groundbreaking studies of Lewis, Nikolajeva and Scott, and Nodelman, which emphasize the demanding quality of the text-picture relationship. As David Lewis suggests, "One of the reasons pictorialization—the promiscuous mixing together of words and images—is able to shake loose generic bonds and derail expectations, is that it enables the picture book to look in two directions at once and sometimes permits the picture-book makers to play off one perspective or view against another" (68). This statement concerns not only picture books from England, France, Germany, Sweden, or the United States, to name just a few countries, but also from Canada, whose picture-book production has increased during the last few decades.

Nevertheless, Canadian picture-book artists are hardly known in Europe. While the reasons for this development are manifold and cannot be analyzed in detail here, a short overview of the influence of Canadian children's literature in Germany in general, and on the reception of Canadian picture books in particular, should reveal the preconditions for my examination, as a German scholar invited to write a review article about eleven recently published Canadian picture books.

"I saw, heard and was conquered by the excellence and manyfoldedness of Canadian children's literature." With this modification of Julius Caesar's famous citation, the English lecturer Hamish Fotheringham enthusiastically praised the high standards of children's books in Canada (5). Nevertheless, his project of an exhibition of modern Canadian children's books in the International Youth Library in Munich has never been realized, nor, indeed, his idea of publishing Dennis Lee's poems in German translation (see Seifert and Weinkauff 938). Although children's books from English-speaking countries have dominated the German book market since the 1960s, familiarity with Canadian children's literature is generally restricted to classic adventure stories and animal stories by writers like Ernest Seton Thompson, Charles Roberts, Grey Owl, Farley Mowat, Sheila Burnford, and James Houston. Nowadays, the best-known Canadian children's book author is Lucy Maud Montgomery. Astonishingly, the Anne of Green Gables series was not translated into German until 1986, almost eighty years after the first Canadian edition. But because the Canadian made-for-television miniseries of 1985 has aired on German television...