Telling Children's Stories: Narrative Theory and Children's Literature

Part Two: Approaches to the Picture Book

part two { Approaches to the Picture Book This part moves us from a larger discussion of genre into a more specific look at the structural form that is unique to children’s literature. This part is the book’s largest in acknowledgment of the picture book’s importance as a unique genre within a genre. In fact the picture book in many ways defines the larger genre and points to the unique and special qualities and issues related to studying children’s books. When people think of “children’s books,” they often think of the picture book. The relationship of image to text found in the picture book is weighty with narrative implications. These five essays examine the narrative peculiarities of picture books in a number of different ways. The section begins with Angela Yannicopoulou’s broad discussion of the ideological implications for different focalization strategies found in picture books. “Focalization in Children’s Picture Books” shows the complicated tensions and complementarity to be found between visual and verbal texts. Following that essay is Magdalena Sikorska’s focused discussion of the strategies of voice (polyphony), space, and narrative time in a particular picture book. “No Consonance, No Consolation: John Burningham’s Time to Get Out of the Bath, Shirley” demonstrates the possibilities for the genre. Alexandra Lewis’s essay, “Telling the Story, Breaking the Boundaries: Metafiction and the Enhancement of Children’s Literary Development in The Bravest Ever Bear and The Story of the Falling Star,” introduces the special nature of metafiction in picture books and considers the matter of irony and the child reader. What are we to think about both the implied audience and the real audience of children when we confront irony, parody, metafiction, shifting narrative view, and other literary features that the common reader doesn’t associate with child readers, especially the youngest of readers? From there we read Andrea Schwenke Wyile’s consideration of implied readership and the assumptions that we make about children as readers of sophisticated, abstract, and “dark” materials. In “Perceiving The Red Tree: Narrative Repair, Writerly Metaphor, and Sensible Anarchy,” Wyile asks what it means for children to read picture books that don’t simply follow conventional wisdom about safe forms for the child reader. Stories that offer counter narratives can encourage children to truly encounter a text because complicated, highly metaphoric, and unfamiliar text formats require active reading. We end with an essay by Nathalie op de Beeck that further examines the tendency of both critics and noncritics to assume that anything for children is simplistic. “Now Playing: Silent Cinema and Picture-Book Montage” is a study of the relationship between film and picture books that reveals their shared techniques in blending visual and written texts, playing with the paratext, and experimenting with the narrative matters of chronology, space, and time. ...