Playing with Picturebooks: Postmodernism and the Postmodernesque by Cherie Allan (review)

Postmodernism likes to draw attention to that with which it is implicated. It may be argued that it is this "look at me, look at me" aspect of certain picturebooks, perhaps most notably John Scieszka and Lane Smith's The Stinky Cheeseman and Other Fairly Stupid Tales (1992), that has attracted some of the regard for picturebooks as both literary and artistic artifacts that now attaches to them. There is, however, an attitude, even among some who are closely involved with children's literature that picturebooks are for pre-readers (of verbal text). Any of us who work with picturebooks will have been on the receiving end of "picturebooks are so sweet" remarks. As, however, Cherie Allan demonstrates in her study of postmodern influences on visual texts for younger readers, many picturebooks are anything but "sweet." They can be complex, daring, and sophisticated, and many of these attributes are due to the employment of postmodern strategies.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century postmodern influences began to be evident in picturebooks; it is here that Allan commences her study, a much-needed endeavour in its efforts to situate a particular category of visual text within a serious literary discourse. Numerous articles on postmodern or experimental picturebook have been published in the past thirty years, and Sipe and Pantaleo, in particular, with their collection of essays Postmodern Picturebooks: Play, Parody and Self-Referentiality (2008) did much to open up the discussion around these texts. Allan refers to a number of these essays in her own volume, one of the strengths of which is the array of secondary texts on which she draws in her effort to untangle what it is that makes a book "postmodern" or even "post-postmodern" and to guide her readers through the characteristics of these texts.

In her introduction, Allan looks back at the development of postmodern literature, recognizing that the term is often misused, and suggesting that its semantic instability reflects the indeterminacy that it embodies. This section of the book will very useful for anyone who is interested in children's literature but not always sure about some of the scholarly terminology that sometimes surrounds its discussion. Citing an impressive range of critics and commentators along the way, she concludes that leading authority on postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon's (1988) designation of the term is the one most suitable to use as a model for a category of picturebooks which not only subvert conventional narrative strategies, but also interrogate the regulatory nature of the liberal humanism which is a sine qua non in children's books. Gradually, she leads readers towards her suggestion that "[t] he postmodern picturebook refuses to abide by conventions, employs a pastiche of styles and generally refuses to conform to a specific generic categorisation" (18).

Broadly adhering to Hutcheon's principles, Allan then moves on to discuss some specific texts in the next five chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 look at how conventional narrative, often the bedrock of children's books, is discommoded by, for example, a multiplicity of voices and points of view, playful use of intertextuality, parody, and disruption of the conventional framework within which texts operate. The next three chapters look at how postmodern picturebooks may question the liberal humanist ethos prevalent in picturebooks. Allen draws attention to ways in which the stability of identity, the privileging of certain societal or racial groups and the marginalisation of others because of "their race, gender, sexual preferences, class, ethnicity, education, social and other positionings" (123) may be disrupted or questioned, to varying extents, in postmodern picturebooks. One of the examples she uses is David Weisner's The Three Pigs, arguing that while it presents a number of postmodern characteristics, such as indeterminacy, it undermines its postmodern credentials when it depicts the pigs engaging in activities that epitomise liberal humanist socio-cultural values of cooperation and compromise.

In her final chapter Allan addresses the evolution of the picturebook within the parameters of the evolving characteristics of postmodern literature...