Poetika slikanice (Picture Book Poetics) by Dragica Haramija, Janja Batič (review)

Slovenia has a long and distinct picture book tradition. This is taken into account in the book Picture Book Poetics by Dragica Haramija and Jana Batič. The two scholars from Maribor University begin by delineating the object of their study. Based on the defining generic relationship between text and image, they classify picture books according to the familiar pattern: “textless picture book”; “picture book,” in which the pictures are more prominent than the text; and “illustrated book,” in which the text dominates the pictures. This part draws on international picture book scholarship and also reader-response theory (Sipe, McGuire, Nodelman, Serafini, et al.)

Building on the methodological foundations developed in the first part, Haramija and Batič review Slovenian picture book production from the second half of the twentieth century to the year 2012 in the detailed second part of their Poetika. Here, they further distinguish between lyrical and epic genres—the lyrical ones including illustrated children’s poems and ballads, the epic fairytale, fables, fantastic and realistic tales, and textless picture books.

The authors use a table of selected quotations with their corresponding illustration to help visualize the variations in text-image relations. This makes apparent, for example, which literary elements—motifs, setting, characters, emotions—the illustrator selects, omits, highlights, or comments on and how this is achieved. In close readings of both the text and the images, the authors examine how illustrations relate to the figurative language of the text, how they play with narrative time and narrated time, or how they create atmosphere and organize space for example. Texts with several illustrations by different illustrators proved to be especially productive for the analysis of text-image relations, such as the modern Slovenian children’s book classic Juri Muri in Africa by Tone Pavček or Bakery Mishmash by Svetlana Makarovič. Dragica Haramija and Jana Batič also consider the overall design and paratexts—including the cover, endpapers, typography, title pages, and format of the book—and describe how they shape the readers’ perception of the text and illustrations.

The forty-one analyses of individual “canonical” picture books illustrate the complexity of possible text-image relationships and show how the two influence one another. Poetika slikanice overwhelmingly demonstrates that illustration is much more than a purely decorative element and that pictures do far more than simply “illustrate” or emulate the “authoritative” text.

The name, the subject index, the extensive bibliography, and especially, the nine-page summary in English grants even readers without knowledge of the Slovenian language an excellent insight into the poetics and the history of the Slovenian picture book.