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

Soon after David Wiesner’s The Three Pigs won the Caldecott Medal, a colleague from another discipline who was rediscovering picturebooks with her own children came to me, held out the book and asked, “Okay, what’s the point?” She could see its cleverness, but she couldn’t see why she should share it or other books like it with her children. I gave her a brief explanation about how metafictive techniques enable children to see that stories are constructed and therefore open to change. As a result, I argued, children may claim the ability to author their own texts, to change endings they don’t like, to innovate on traditional tales that put characters they relate to in unfavorable positions. In other words, I gave her a very simple, one-dimensional perspective on postmodern literature for children.

Had we had that conversation today, I might have simply handed her Cherie Allan’s book, and let her draw her own conclusions about the value of postmodern and postmodernesque picturebooks. She would certainly be well equipped to do so after reading Allan’s clear explanations, but perhaps just as importantly, she would be compelled to form her own opinions, as Allan accomplishes that wonderful and increasingly rare feat in contemporary criticism: she describes, analyzes and explains how picturebooks interact with aspects of contemporary culture without taking either an advocacy or an oppositional position. What she does, however, is offer a thorough investigation of how post-modern thought has found its way into picturebooks.

As Allan notes early on, postmodernism is a notoriously ambiguous term, the understanding of which is not helped by its imprecise overuse. In clean, well-researched chunks, then, she traces the history of the term and clarifies the slippage between postmodernism, postmodernity, and a new coinage of her own, postmodernesque. After outlining the various ways the terms have been defined by the most prominent scholars of postmodern literary and cultural theory, she indicates that she will “use postmodernity to refer to the political and socioeconomic organisation of society and postmodernism to refer to the cultural practices of said society” (7). Certainly, though, postmodernity as a historical shift and postmodernism as an ideological one are connected in reciprocal and material ways; taking Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith’s Little Red Hen as her poster poultry, Allan illustrates how postmodernism attacks the processes whereby stories write children into the ideologies of a liberal humanist culture that, in postmodernity, may be going the way of the CRT. She offers a very brief but remarkably complete overview of the cultural changes evident in postmodernity and most relevant to the picturebook form; these include a democratization of taste driven in large part by the ubiquitous access to screen media, the embrace by contemporary children of hyperreality, multimodal texts and fragmentation in their spatial environments, and the dominance of consumerism and spectacle as primary avenues of pleasure.

Allan then moves her attention away from the world in which children live, and takes up her primary focus, which is the influence of the ideas and aesthetic practices of postmodernism on picturebooks. She avers that “[q]uestions about ontological plurality, multiple realities, naturalised ideologies and contested constructions of history [some of the basic tenets of postmodernism] are evident in many texts for adults but also emerge in playful ways in many examples of postmodern picturebooks” (17). In the chapters that follow, she provides both explanations and close readings of books that employ metafictive techniques to disrupt and call attention to established conventions of point of view, representation, and narrative framing in picturebook storytelling, as well as practices that interrogate the representation of reality, history, and subjectivity under a liberal humanist paradigm.

Her first two chapters, “Looking Beneath the Surface” and “Destabilising Modes of Representation,” focus on the varieties of metafictive techniques that expose the relationship between reality and the fiction that purports to represent it. She describes and gives examples of intertextuality and its subspecies, parody, frame-breaking, metalepsis, and the postmodern chronotope, which...